>The bridge is in trouble because the BOE — its owners — deferred necessary maintenance.

>The bridge is in trouble because the BOE — its owners — deferred necessary maintenance.


Let’s not spin this as a good thing. The bridge is in trouble because the BOE — its owners — deferred necessary maintenance. By this argument, if the BOE stops maintaining the High School building itself maybe it will fall down and we can get a new one. It’s only money, after all.

Charlie Reilly’s comments are worth examining:

“Recently resigned trustee Charlie Reilly spoke up as a member of the public to defend the decision to delay bridge repairs in favor of other capital improvements from a budgetary standpoint.

“To say that expenditures on this bridge could have been done, and that we had the resources to do it, is completely fallacious,” he said, adding that the bond referendum vote would likely have not passed if bridge repairs were incorporated.”

So the BOE, knowing that the bridge had serious structural issues as documented in the 2009 engineering report, hid that fact during the bonding process. Reilly’s comment that expenditures could have been done is itself fallacious. The BOE had $48M to work with. Do we seriously think fixing or rebuilding the bridge would have caused the bond not to pass? 

These are apologies after the fact. The BOE knew the situation, deliberately did nothing, and now we have a much larger bill to pay.

Rebuilding this bridge will cost hundreds of thousands.