'A Great Step': Officials Back Gov. Healey's New Cape Cod Bridges Replacement Strategy
Massachusetts Governor Maura T. Healey reaffirmed her administration’s commitment to the Cape Cod Bridges Replacement Program this week, announcing a new, more competitive approach to secure funding by first working solely on the Sagamore Bridge. The phased plan, an aberration from previous concepts, has been met with approval across the board from many of the commonwealth’s elected officials.
An email announcement from the governor’s office on Monday, August 14, outlined the new funding strategy, which it said will be one of the largest federal infrastructure grants on a single project in American history. It involves finalizing a pair of applications, one due next week and another in the fall, to compete for $1.45 billion in federal funds.
The news comes after the Healey-Driscoll administration’s recent inclusion of $262 million in its Fiscal Years 2024-2028 Capital Investment Plan for the bridges, building toward the governor’s longterm commitment of $700 million.
Gov. Healey’s statement said that prioritizing one of the bridges—in this case, the Sagamore, which bears more traffic—makes for a more competitive application. Local and state officials in the area, including Bourne Town Administrator Marlene McCollem and US Representative William R. Keating (D-Bourne) largely agreed with the administration’s assessment that this strategy puts the commonwealth “on the best footing to move forward on this project that is critical for the economy for the Cape and our entire state.”
“I actually think this approach makes a lot of sense,” Ms. McCollem said on Wednesday. “I can’t speak to it from the funding strategy side, but from my perspective on providing local services during a project like this, it is actually quite a relief to do one bridge and then the other bridge.”
The idea of having both bridges under construction simultaneously was anxiety-provoking, Ms. McCollem said. But this approach, per the governor’s announcement, allows the state to secure funding for and break ground on the Sagamore Bridge, while permitting and design work for both bridges and groundwork for the Bourne Bridge is laid in the background.
Ms. McCollem called the funding applications “a great step,” noting that because of rapidly rising costs, it “makes perfect sense to try to lock in one [bridge], at least,” and then move forward with other grant rounds.
“The costs are just growing so quickly that it’s one of the cases where it seems like the sooner the better to get it under contract,” she said.
In a phone interview this week, Rep. Keating concurred, saying that the goal with this strategy is “to capture as much money as we could through the grants.” Prior grant proposals for the project included no matching funds from the commonwealth, he said, which “effectively made them dead on arrival and [is] why we didn’t get them.”
Rep. Keating praised Gov. Healey’s initiative in committing up to $700 million in matching funds from the state toward the project, which the administration said it has been strategizing to secure funding for since day one.
“She is, in her words, 1,000 percent behind both bridges’ replacements as I am,” he said, referencing his years of work on the issue in both Washington, DC, and the commonwealth. He was joined in commending the project earlier this week by Democratic US Senators Edward J. Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, with whom he released a joint statement.
Living just minutes from the Bourne Bridge, the congressman said he knows firsthand the plights of bridge and rotary traffic.
“That’s the way of life,” he said, “that’s where I live.”
Rep. Keating’s unique understanding of how vital the two spans are, though, goes beyond just Bourne, as the Cape Cod Canal and its bridges serve as the gateway to all of Cape Cod and the islands.
“I understand the economic impact,” he said. “These are important issues…. This is going to be a gigantic project, it’s going to span over a decade, and I want to make sure there is as much planning, as much consideration for the interruptions that occur, [and] that ways to avoid that are built in at early stages.”
The project is still in its infancy stages—construction of the Sagamore is projected to begin in 2028, followed by construction of the Bourne Bridge in 2029—but that does not mean that discussions are not being had. The Healey-Driscoll administration said it has been collaborating with the federal delegation and the Biden administration for the past seven months to prepare the application, and Rep. Keating said that both state and local officials have been privy to that work.
“The town is an integral part of that table, on an ongoing basis at every stage because it’s the most fundamentally affected,” he said.
Barnstable County Board of Regional Commissioners chairman Mark R. Forest told the board on Wednesday that he participated in a project briefing on Monday and called it “very impressive” and “a very, very good presentation” by MassDOT. He highlighted the Healey-Driscoll administration’s advancement of the project, a significant change from the prior administration’s briefings that were essentially “a rehash and a regurgitation of some very, very preliminary information.” Still, commissioner Sheila R. Lyons advised that there “has to be a lot of public hand-holding and advocacy” for residents of Bourne and Sandwich, who stand to be most impacted.
Concerns remain, of course, but doing the bridges one at a time, Ms. McCollem said, allows everyone to “learn from the experience of the Sagamore [Bridge] and make good adjustments” for when the focus shifts to the Bourne Bridge.
“It’s a major undertaking to do this,” she said, adding that there is much to take into consideration, including utilities, permitting, actual construction, rebuilding connecting roads, and impacts to school bus routes, emergency vehicles and daily commuters.
“These are important regional links in the transportation network,” she said, “but here in Bourne, these are our local roads and we travel over them multiple times every day: our residents, our school buses, our police cars, our trash trucks. We use these bridges all the time, they knit this town together and we work really hard to try to treat both sides of the canal as equally as we can, and it can be tough when we can’t get there.”
Doing the Sagamore Bridge first, Ms. McCollem said, is a wise decision that gives “everybody involved a chance to figure out the details, [and] work through some of the issues, rather than committing to both crossings at the same time.” It will not be a quick and easy project to complete, she added, but doing it is unavoidable.
“I think these bridges absolutely have to get done,” she said. “There’s no question that they are necessary, and I think everybody is committed. The key is going to be working together as much as we can to move forward and win. Problems come up, we talk about them and we try to mitigate them, but not doing these bridges is not an option.”
The first application for competitive discretionary grant funding is set to be submitted on Monday, August 21, the administration said, with the second closely following this fall. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation is the lead applicant, applying jointly with the owner of the bridges, the US Army Corps of Engineers. Funding is being sought through the federal Multimodal Project Discretionary Grant (which includes the Nationally Significant Multimodal Freight & Highway Projects program and the National Infrastructure Project Assistance program) and the Bridge Investment Program BIP.
Alex Megerle contributed to reporting on this story.