Four months after cost estimates showed the project to replace the Interstate 5 bridge over the Columbia River had more than doubled in price, officials leading the Interstate Bridge Replacement project still hadn't shared the estimates with lawmakers from Washington and Oregon, despite heated demands for updated figures.
Those projections, based on records from August obtained by a Portland economist watchdogging the project, show the effort to replace decades-old spans with a modern bridge leapt from $6 billion to $13.6 billion.
Yet the 16 members on a bistate commission of legislators overseeing the project were told in December that staff continues to develop the cost estimate."
At that Dec. 15 commission meeting, Oregon state Rep. Thủy Trần, D-Portland, forcefully questioned why lawmakers hadn't received cost updates since 2022.
"I hope your team can get us a budget by January or earlier," Trần told Carley Francis, the newly named interim administrator of the project, who also leads the southwest region for the Washington State Department of Transportation. "I want a date, and I want a report, or else I would say your team is not doing its work, to be blunt, ma'am."
The ballooning costs and angry legislators are just the latest chapter in a decadeslong saga to build a bridge on a major urban highway that connects two states. The eye-popping price tag of the span could imperil the bridge as both states' transportation departments struggle to finish their own megaprojects on time and on budget.
Francis said at the December meeting that the cost was unknowable until the Coast Guard weighed in to help decide whether the replacement bridge features a movable span like the existing bridge or has a fixed span, a design preferred by the two states because of its lower cost.
A cost estimate would come within 60 days of a Coast Guard decision. That decision could come as soon as Friday.
In a statement, Francis said it was "inaccurate" to describe the August documents as an updated cost estimate. Instead, they are an "early step" in a "time-sensitive process that involves several iterations, with each step building upon the work of the previous step."
Francis, who took over the project in October, said it's long been known that the cost would increase.
"Nationally, infrastructure projects across the nation are currently experiencing significant price increases," she said, adding the project wasn't "immune to the cost increases we are seeing around the country."
The two bridges that currently cross the Columbia opened to traffic in 1917 and 1958. The older span, which carries southbound traffic, was originally part of Highway 99 and carried electric streetcars, as well as autos, until 1940. The second span was built to carry the growing load of traffic just as the nation embarked on building the Interstate Highway System.
Now, both states recognize the bridges are seismically unsafe and have embarked on decades of planning to build not only a new bridge but also widen the highway to include a light rail line connecting Portland to Vancouver and 5 miles of new on- and offramps stretching north and south.
The current project follows an effort thwarted by Washington state Republican lawmakers in 2013 called the Columbia Crossing. That project, estimated at $3.4 billion, was shut down by Govs. Jay Inslee and John Kitzhaber after the Washington state Senate refused to consider a transportation package that included money for the bridge, primarily because the bridge supported light rail.
"We told the governor from the very start … it will be dead on arrival," state Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, said at the time. "He just wouldn't listen."
Washington state Rep. Jake Fey, D-Tacoma, said it was this decision that led to the financial straits the project is in today. He doesn't think Francis, the new project leader, was hiding anything, and said criticisms come from people who don't have "the perspective and the history with this" as he does.
"They're not done with the work" to estimate costs, said Fey, who leads the House Transportation Committee and sits on the bistate commission. "I think they were doing their best to get it right."
Regardless, Fey said he anticipated the cost to soar, and "quite likely we won’t build every piece" of the project proposal.
"My hope is there’s enough resources to build the bridge and landings, enough money to demolish the existing bridge," he said. "That bridge, the physical structure, we've got to get to that before we have a failure."
Since the project was revived by the state Legislature in 2017, and given a new name, it has won $2.1 billion in federal awards from 2023 and 2024. Washington and Oregon each pledged about $1 billion, and tolls on the bridge are expected to bring in $1.2 billion for construction, as well as provide ongoing revenue for bridge maintenance and operations.
By the time the federal contributions were promised, however, the project's cost was already growing. In 2020, an estimate put the maximum cost at $4.8 billion. In 2022, that jumped to $7.5 billion.
Now, the maximum is said to be $17.7 billion, according to project documents obtained by Joe Cortright, a Portland economist and antifreeway activist whose public records request led to the revelations, as first reported by the Oregon Journalism Project.
Cortright said the growth is not just a matter of construction inflation. Construction costs have gone up by 30% or more on transportation projects in the Pacific Northwest in recent years.
Cortright points to the information his public records request uncovered, such as spreadsheets detailing costs, broken out into 29 different construction packages. Buried in there are breakdowns of the cost increase from 2022 to 2025.
Construction costs, according to the estimate, grew by 68%. The biggest growth, though, is in "non-construction" costs. Those account for engineering consultants and staff time, and grew by 406% — a $1.2 billion increase from about $300,000 to $1.5 billion.
"It's kind of a permanent employment act for consultants," Cortright said.
Fey, who said he hadn't examined the documents, defended the use of consultants, saying the state didn't have the resources to hire scores of planners and engineers for projects that have defined life spans.
"As far back as 2015, there was a conscious decision to say, 'We're going to rely on consultants for (big projects). We’re not going to build staff up,'" Fey said. "WSDOT has their own challenges with being able to recruit people."
Cortright said the new cost estimates will, and should, imperil the project, which he said was sold as a project to replace an old bridge but is actually one to widen a highway.
"They’ve kept kicking the can down the road without telling anybody how much they think it will cost," he said. "It gives us an opportunity to revisit this. If it were a like-to-like replacement of the bridge, I don’t think anybody would be against this project.
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