BELLEFONTE — Centre County accepted a state grant for $1.365 million grant to fix three bridges that are considered at risk. The grant comes through the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Multimodal Transportation Fund and will be used along with $585,000 from the county’s Act 14 “at risk local bridge funds” to fix bridges in Spring, Curtin and Miles townships.
Local, county, state and PennDOT representatives were on hand as county commissioners signed for the grant Oct. 18 at the Willowbank Building.
Included in the Local Bridge Bundle Project are the Fox Gap Road Bridge in Miles Township, Lower Coleville Road Bridge in Spring Township and the Front Street Bridge in Curtin Township. All three bridges already have or are facing lane or weight restrictions because of structural deterioration. The bridges provide important access to communities that would face significant issues if the bridges were to become usable.
“One only needs to point to Benner and Spring Township. A couple of years ago, we had a flood and the road to Purdue Mountain that washed away and we spent a better part of two years trying to fix that and it’s not just inconvenient, but a hardship in that it caused all the people who lived on Purdue Mountain to backtrack everyday to get into town,” said state Sen. Jake Corman, R-Bellefonte.
Corman added later that these three bridges provided important access to people in the community and, “make no mistake about it, if this funding was not secured and nothing would have been done, eventually PennDOT would have shut these bridges down.”
The bridge on Lower Coleville Road in Spring Township was built in 1965 and is one of two bridges that serves the area in Spring Township and parts of Benner Township.
“So if there are any issues, this challenging bridge has created some problems for us in the past,” said Spring Township supervisor Dave Capperella. “Every year, this bridge has been getting worse and worse, and as you can see, the estimated cost to replace this is about $800,000. For small municipalities like Spring Township, $800,000 is a little difficult to come by. Through this bundling of the three bridges with the county, we have finally been able to secure that funding.”
It was a sentiment shared by Curtin Township, as it has been struggling to keep up with the Front Street bridge for years.
“This would have broken Curtin Township for years to come, this kind of money put in,” said Curtin Township supervisor Jeff Harter. “We have tried to do repairs to this bridge for years on our own to try to keep up and there was really no way to do so. So, we very much appreciate this.”
Mike Bloom, the Centre County assistant director of planning and community development who was instrumental in getting the funds for these bridges, said construction won’t begin until 2019 at the earliest. He said that, most likely, during construction one lane will remain open at a time for the bridges and if that is not possible a temporary bridge may be used.
