Newsroom

Bridging the political divide in Oregon has become increasingly challenging in recent years. The task isn’t going to get any easier when the cost of the I-5 bridge balloons into the ozone.

Twenty-two years ago, before the iPhone was invented and Elon Musk had yet to build a single Tesla, Oregon began the planning process to construct a new interstate bridge across the Columbia River.

Fast forward to today: There are almost 8 billion smartphones in the world, 8 million Teslas on the road, but not a single shovel of dirt has been spaded to begin the bridge-building project.

Now, new revelations of soaring cost estimates — pried free from the secret vault of bridge officials — indicate a project that has spiraled out of fiscal reality.

Pegged at a cost of between $2-$3 billion in 2005, which was revised to $6-$7 billion in the last publicly released estimate in 2022, the current projected cost is now $13.6 billion — double the last projection.

Estimates were updated for both a fixed-span bridge and a movable-span bridge. “Worst case” scenarios indicate it could approach nearly $18 billion.

WOW, spelled backwards, is WOW!

Source: IBR Project Estimate Document August 15, 2025

This revelation comes on the heels of a highly controversial transportation funding package, rammed through the legislature along partisan lines in an Emergency Session and now doomed by referendum. While legislators worked the bill, the new cost estimates were sealed in secrecy.

This only serves to further fracture the relationship between ODOT and the Legislature that funds it. Ironically, it may be the issue that brings Republicans and Democrats together.

Rep. Thuy Tran (D-Portland), a member of the Bi-State Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Committee, is furious. She told Willamette Week, which first broke the story, “They lied to me, to the committee, and by extension to the public.”

Tran was referring to the response she received during a committee meeting of Oregon and Washington legislators on Dec. 15. Tran drilled interim IBR project director Carley Francis why she was not providing an updated estimate range of the project cost as had been promised. Francis replied: “We will give you time frames when we have them.”

To her credit, Tran was the only Oregon legislator to press the agency on the delay in providing estimated costs and question whether someone was indeed hiding the ball.

“A nakedly political process to avoid delivering bad news.”

— Chris Smith, Just Crossing Alliance

Who knew about the spiraling cost estimates and when did they know about them? Who made the decision to keep the information from the legislature and the public?

Another disturbing issue is that the information was only obtained through a public records request by City Observatory economist Joe Cortright. AND IT DID NOT COME FROM ODOT. Instead it was the Washington Department of Transportation that fulfilled the public records request because, Cortright said, their state agencies are more responsive than Oregon’s.

It is also interesting to note that while IBR officials point to increased costs of materials like concrete and steel, the revised estimates show that the biggest percentage inflator has been for all the consultants. While construction costs are estimated to increase by 68%, the costs for consultants and staff are estimated to increase by 406%. You might call it the “consultant industrial complex.”

Cortright says this result comes from misaligned incentives.

“Misaligned incentives means that consultants have different incentives than the state agency hiring them. Consultants make more when the project is larger, takes longer, and is more expensive — all things that drive up costs. This is the classic ‘principal agent’ problem, and by delegating nearly the entire process to profit-motivated consultants, and failing to diligently and expertly supervise them, it is little surprise that the costs of this project has exploded.”

Looming on the horizon is a $2 billion grant from the federal government for the project. It is set to expire by September if construction has not begun. If it evaporates, Oregon and Washington would have to add that additional cost burden to their worksheets.

For ODOT, an agency saddled with over $4 billion in debt and current operating revenues insufficient to meet expenditures, the prospect of adding billions more to their share of the IBR project will require more than pixie dust.

Oregonians must face the prospect that the project won’t get built or will have to be scaled back significantly. That would make all those consultants very unhappy.