🔨 A $3.3 Million Test Pile Deal for the Old Bridge - HRWSBA Sept-Oct '26

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 🌉 September–October 2026 Bridge Authority Round-Up

Agencies Covered: Hood River-White Salmon Bridge Authority (five meetings: a special session on September 8, and regular meetings on September 21 and 28, October 12, and October 29).

The Bottom Line: The test piles that will tell us whether building the new bridge harms the old one were awarded on October 29 for $3,333,140, less than half the roughly $7 million the Authority had planned for. As of that meeting, the big federal grant decision had not come.

The Vibe: Brisk and a little relieved. Six weeks from bid to award, a price that beat the estimate, and a board that spent more time on permits and cash flow than on arguments.

🔎 What Changed

• The board awarded the test-pile installation contract to Advanced American Construction, Inc. on October 29.
• Federal Highways confirmed in writing on September 23 that the $200 million INFRA grant can be obligated until September 30, 2027.
• NPS and Oregon Parks preliminarily agreed to shrink the park land the project must replace, and the Port of Hood River backed it on October 20.
• The board adopted a package of grant-compliance policies on October 12, answering an outside consultant's review.

⚠ What Escalated

• The Phase 1B finish date slipped to October 7, 2027, right into the first in-water work window, before recovering to September 21 a month later.
• Two federal reimbursements are still stuck: one at 509 days, one at 184.
• Both early property appraisals came in above what the cost estimate assumed.

🧭 What's Next

• November 2 to 13, 2026: Port of Hood River maintenance closes the bridge overnight, midnight to 5:30 a.m., weekdays, with more daytime lane work through December 11.
• November 10 to 13, 2026: the Bridge Authority's pre-inspection of the old bridge, ahead of the test piles, brings three to four full closures of up to an hour each day between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m., plus rolling stops of up to 15 minutes. Exact times depend on weather. Schedules: Port of Hood River news and alerts.
• January 2027: the test piles go in the river, if permits arrive. Work has to be out of the water by March 15.
• End of 2026: when staff expect a decision on the Bridge Investment Program grant.
• Coming up near you: hearings, comment deadlines and budget meetings for all agencies are on our Notice Board, updated twice a week.

Hood River-White Salmon Bridge Authority

🔨 Test piles: from Plan B to an approved price

In August the board could not get a price it liked from Kiewit, its design-build contractor, for driving test piles next to the 1924 bridge. So it voted to line up a competitive bid as a backup. (Our August edition has that fight.) By October 29 the backup was the plan.

The timeline, from the Authority's own award memo:

• September 8: the board authorized advertising an Invitation to Bid. The scope is 16 temporary 36-inch steel piles, eight on the Oregon side and eight on the Washington side, driven and then pulled back out.
• September 15: the bid went out. A voluntary site visit followed on September 23.
• Five firms applied to bid and four were prequalified. Three bids came in on October 15: Advanced American Construction at $3,333,140, HME Construction at $5,989,000, and Orion Marine Contractors at $7,427,000.
• The Authority's planning estimate was about $7 million. (The September 8 memo had said about $6 million.)
• Because the low bid was so far under the others, staff ran extra checks on scope, pricing and equipment and found no basis for rejecting the bid. Nobody protested by the October 24 deadline.

The board approved the award on October 29, subject to the contractor's bonds, insurance and contract documents. The vote was by voice; the roll call will be in that meeting's typed minutes. Staff said the money for this contract and the rope-access one comes from underruns on the design phase, not new funding.

Why so low? On tape, staff pointed to timing: the company, which Columbia Gorge News describes as Portland-based, was just finishing similar work for BNSF a short way downstream. Its president, there to answer questions, said the firm has replaced four of the six BNSF bridges in the Gorge. Asked about risk to the old bridge, he said, "I've driven piles around a lot of structures and I've never had one fall down."

Commissioner Mike Fox put the case for the program plainly, as the paper also reported: "this is cheap insurance for us." The old bridge's foundations are not on rock, and the new one goes right next to it.

The deal has three other pieces:

• HNTB oversight. On September 21 the board added test-pile management, environmental testing and monitoring to HNTB's contract as Amendment 12, not to exceed $2,022,335. Commissioner Jacob Anderson abstained because he had missed the closed-session discussion. The vote was four to nothing. (Columbia Gorge News covered it.)
• Rope access. Extreme Access gets up to $40,000 to rig climbers for HNTB's pre-inspection of the old bridge in the week of November 9. It was not the lowest of three quotes; staff chose it for its prior work on this bridge, and $15,000 of the total is a contingency that staff said covers wind delays.
• Port access. A new agreement with the Port of Hood River, which owns the bridge, lets the project inspect, survey and fly drones on it through 2027.

Not every voice was comfortable on September 8. One board member warned that, with permits not yet in hand, the worst case was "we just wasted money." The board went ahead because, as the case was put that day, a 100-year-old bridge with no data is the bigger risk.

⏳ The schedule slipped, then recovered

The August progress report moved Phase 1B completion to October 7, 2027. That was 108 days past the contract date, and it landed inside the first in-water work window, when the real construction is supposed to start. The report blamed a federal Section 408 review.

Fox did not like it. "Going all the way out to 10-7 is really not good," he said on September 28. He wanted to know how to win the time back, and offered to go to agency bosses himself if that is what it took. Alternate Kathryn Thomas, who has been working the permits with staff, urged patience: the dates come from the project's own guesses about when agencies will act, and she said they were conservative. The board also asked for a fallback plan in case the project misses part of the window.

The September report backed her up. Phase 1B moved back to September 21, 2027, 16 days better, because permits finished early. Engineering and Construction is sketching that fallback schedule.

Staff also told the board that Kiewit had asked to stretch Phase 1B from 21 months to 25 for permit-related work, and that staff rejected the request because it did not say what the extra time was for.

The design itself is close. The 100% main package is due in early November, foundations in January, and the final construction set on April 1, 2027. The goal is to give a construction contractor a limited notice to proceed in April 2027 if the federal grant comes through.

💵 The money: under budget, thin cushion

The design phase keeps coming in under budget. By the end of September the work done was worth $46.7 million and cost $34.1 million. Kiewit now forecasts finishing about $13 million under its contract, and in September the board heard there were likely more savings beyond Kiewit's own forecast.

The squeeze is timing, not totals. The tightest month is May 2027, just before the next tranche of funding becomes available. The Authority expects about $79 million available then against about $68.5 million spent, a cushion of roughly $10 million, and that is before the test-pile program comes out of it. An $8 million earmark administered through ODOT is still waiting on an agreement between ODOT and Federal Highways, and every month it slides, the cushion gets thinner.

The bigger picture held. The total cost estimate is still $1.12 billion, and the contingency for building the new bridge and taking down the old one is about $151 million.

Tolls. August brought in $754,528.50 on 360,142 crossings. The toll reserve now tops $10.77 million against a goal of about $15 million, though $1.675 million was moved to checking to cover cash flow.

📜 A federal deadline, settled in writing

On September 28, HNTB's Kary Witt told the board that the 2024 award letter for the $200 million INFRA grant had said the money must be obligated by September 30, 2026. Staff had heard for months that it was really 2027, but had nothing in writing. Witt reported that the written answer had arrived: an email, relayed from Federal Highways headquarters, confirming the funds stay available until September 30, 2027. The Authority's October 12 report records the same date.

Columbia Gorge News reported the new deadline as September 2028. The Authority's own written report says September 30, 2027, and that is the date we are using. As of September, staff had also asked to move it to 2031.

The catch has not changed. The U.S. Department of Transportation will not let the Authority use the INFRA money until the whole project is funded, and that hinges on the Bridge Investment Program application. The board directed staff on September 21 to find out whether every project gets treated that way.

🧾 Still waiting on Federal Highways

• A BUILD grant reimbursement request of $404,548 had sat in federal review for 509 days by the end of September.
• A RAISE grant reimbursement had sat 184 days, and about $2 million more in RAISE spending had not been submitted while a reviewer questioned Kiewit's billing rates.
• WSDOT caught up on its slow payments in September.

One commissioner urged getting this sorted before the big construction contract, when monthly bills could run $15 to $20 million. The idea: sit down with Federal Highways first and agree on what paperwork it needs, so payments arrive on a schedule a contract can promise.

🏞 Park land, property and wetlands

• 6(f) park land. NPS and Oregon Parks have preliminarily agreed to a smaller conversion area at the waterfront. On October 20 the Port of Hood River Commission backed it and voted to dedicate its own land to the project. It was not yet signed as of October 29, so the cost forecast had not been lowered to match. (Background: $3.4M State Park Dispute Hits Bridge Project.)
• Property. The first two appraisals, the park land and the one private Washington parcel, both came in higher than the cost estimate assumed. Staff aim to recommend an offer on the Washington parcel before the end of the year.
• Wetlands. The project cannot avoid filling some wetlands at the Washington landing, and there is no room to replace them on site. The Authority is looking for at least two acres of degraded land in Washington, in the Columbia River, Jewett Creek or Major Creek watersheds, and asked commissioners to send leads to Co-Chair Eric Wilson.
• White Salmon review. A new task order pays the City of White Salmon up to $37,000 for its shoreline and land use review, with a decision expected in early 2027.

🎨 Friends of the Columbia Gorge, after the meeting

In August, Commissioner Arthur Babitz called Friends of the Columbia Gorge's response to the Authority's aesthetics memo "both late and disturbing." On September 21 he read a different note into the record, a summary he said Friends' leadership had agreed was accurate:

"They were clear that while they submitted comments it is not their intent or desire to delay or block our bridge project."

The statement says the two sides discussed "the Gorge Commission's delegation of the Klickitat County review to Hood River County," which Friends believes is "a bad precedent for future projects which involve multiple counties." That needs a little decoding. In Klickitat County, the Gorge Commission handles Scenic Area land use applications itself. For this bridge, the Washington half went to Hood River County instead, so one Oregon county is reviewing the whole crossing. The statement does not say what harm Friends sees in that, and no Authority record explains it. Bridges between counties, and between states, are nothing new; what may be unusual here is a county reviewing ground in another state. The Authority says it was just following the instructions it was given. On concrete color, it promised a technical memo explaining how it reached its conclusions.

Hood River County's comment period drew four or five comments, according to the engineering committee report. The record through October 29 holds no county decision.

🤝 Also in September and October

• Grant compliance. On October 12 the board adopted new policies on cost checks, cash management, grant administration, procurement and conflicts of interest, built from Baker Tilly's review of its federal grant controls. A policy on how the board reviews invoices was held back for more work.
• Agreements. A City of Hood River agreement covers permit and design review, up to $50,000 (Co-Chair Grant Polson, a Hood River city councilor, recused). An ODOT agreement does the same up to $100,000.
• Traffic and revenue. CDM Smith presented its draft investment-grade traffic and revenue study on October 12, the forecast lenders will use for the toll-backed loan. It assumes the new bridge opens in October 2031, with tolls rising then and by 15% in 2035 and every five years after. It stays in draft until the loan process starts.
• Committees. Alternate Mark Flaming took over Funding and Finance on September 17. Alternate Kathryn Thomas reports for the procurement oversight committee.
• Out in public. The first Coffee with Commissioners ran in Hood River in September, and an October 1 information session at SOCA wine shop in White Salmon drew about 16 visitors, by Co-Chair Wilson's count. Fox said one man came up to him convinced "the bridge is dead. You guys didn't get any of your funding." Commissioners want more, shorter evening events.
• Tribes. The Umatilla tribes and the Authority have both signed their agreement; as of October 29, Federal Highways had not. NOAA Fisheries told the project no new Endangered Species Act consultation is needed.
• Closures. Thomas reminded staff the Port wants at least 30 days' notice before any bridge closure for this work.

⚠️ Editor's Notebook: Broader Context

• Why a low bid is not automatically a warning sign. If it awards at all, a public agency running a sealed bid has to award to the lowest responsive, responsible bidder, which is why staff checked so hard before recommending one this far under the field. The bid prices cover the work as written, a lump sum plus unit prices; the risk to the Authority shows up later, as change orders, if the scope was loose. The board debated exactly that on September 8, when one board member pushed for a two-step bid with a technical round first.
• Why the cash cushion matters more than the underrun. Being under budget does not help if the money is not available in the month the bills come due. The Authority is a two-state public body without a state DOT's cash on hand, which is why slow federal reimbursements and a stalled $8 million earmark get so much airtime.

🛠 Jargon Buster

• Test pile: a temporary pile driven to learn what the ground and the old bridge do, then pulled out.
• Invitation to Bid: a sealed-bid solicitation; the contract goes to the lowest bidder who meets the requirements, with no negotiation.
• Obligation deadline: the date by which federal money has to be formally committed to a project, or it lapses.
• Earned value: what the finished work was worth, compared with what it cost.
• 6(f): the federal rule protecting park land bought with Land and Water Conservation Fund money; converting it means replacing it.

📅 How to Join & Learn More

• The board meets the second and fourth Mondays at 2 p.m. at 1000 E Jewett Blvd, Suite 204, White Salmon, and on Zoom. November's first meeting is November 9.
• Public comment: three minutes per person at every regular meeting. No one commented at any of these five meetings.
• Agendas, packets and recordings: hrwsba.gov. Project news and closure schedules: hoodriverbridge.org. Accessibility: 509-210-8440.