A lame duck takes flight series
As the costs of budget cuts and deferred maintenance on local infrastructure are driven home by the emergency closure of the Champlain Bridge between New york and Vermont , Vermont Gov. Douglas,other state officials and executives from Vermont businesses left the country (as far as we know).
As part of a previously planned trip they have flown to Asia in an effort to attract foreign business investors to the state. How will the news of the areas crumbling infrastructure impress potential foreign investors?
While the governor is gone state officials from New York and Vermont are left to deal with the declared emergency surrounding the Champlain Bridge closure
The Champlain Bridge was known to be in bad repair, studies were in progress and the bridge had been shut down to one lane within the last year .It seems though that few contingency plans had been made about what to do about 4,000 people that pass over the bridge daily if the bridge needed to shut down completely as is now the case. Business owners and workers on both sides of the lake are worried about the financial effect of the closure. One local hospital has patients and employees on both sides of the lake in need of transportation.
Before leaving Governor Douglas took the time to share his expert reading of the situation “Detours are time consuming and costly. This is not just about convenience; this is an economic burden as well as a safety issue,”
Extra ferries have been added and are running longer hours but winter is swooping in quickly. Hopes for a temporary bridge were put to rest by the VT Agency of Transportation spokesman John Zicconi who said
What the state isn't likely to do, he said, is put in a temporary bridge. He said the lake is an international waterway and such a bridge would block it, something the federal government is unlikely to approve. He also said there were safety concerns with such bridges on the lake.
No safety concerns were cited about possible problems with increased ferry traffic.
At a public hearing in Addison on Oct. 8, residents had ridiculed the idea of substituting ferry service for the ailing bridge. Vermont Transportation Secretary David Dill made no suggestion that ferries would be anything but a short-term alternative to people driving 100 miles to work in another state.
The initial estimate was that a new ferry would require a round-trip ticket price of $131, Dill said. But it might be possible to get a federal subsidy for the additional ferry route, thus reducing that price, he said — but not compensating affected individuals or companies directly for their expenses during the declared transportation emergency, he said.
Also posted at Green Mountain Daily
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