Santa Rosa Commission rejects offer to replace the Navarre Beach Causeway Bridge
A company that had come all the way from Delaware to attempt to sell the Santa Rosa County Commission on the idea of letting its crews take down and replace the Navarre Beach Causeway Bridge was sent home Thursday empty handed.
Commissioners could not get past the concept of asking residents to pay the hefty tolls Delivering Bridges LLC, formerly United Bridge Partners, wanted to charge to cover the cost of construction.
"I don't think this board has an appetite for the toll that goes along with the cost," Commission Chairman Sam Parker told Doug Witt, the president and CEO of Delivering Bridges LLC, who presented the company's bridge proposal.
Witt and his cohort, Addison Smith, appeared before the commission to attempt to sell it on the idea of allowing the company to fund the demolition of the existing Navarre Beach Causeway Bridge, build a new span and then – under either an ownership or lease agreement – manage its maintenance and function as a tolled enterprise.
The cost of construction would be, at a minimum, somewhere between $150 and $200 million, according to the presentation, and Delivering Bridges LLC was recommending toll charges of between $2.35 and $3.35.
A second alternative would have seen the bridge constructed at a location other than where the existing one stands now at a cost of $250 to $300 million. Tolls on the more expensive alternative were estimated at between $4.25 and $5.20.
Witt attempted to infuse a note of urgency into his sales pitch to the county by letting them know that "costs are going through the roof," and the price of constructing a new bridge will not likely come down any time soon.
The proposal to build the new bridge arrived unsolicited, but after the meeting Commissioner Kerry Smith said the value in hearing what Delivering Bridges LLC had to say might have been to give the board another means of convincing county voters to support a referendum to implement a half-cent sales tax to help pay for transportation infrastructure.
"It's probably a good discussion item," he said of the cost of building a new Navarre Beach Bridge. "'What exactly will your extra half cent do?' We'll never be able to pay for that bridge alone. There's going to be a state assist. If we're going to go to (the Florida Department of Transportation) for help, we're going to need skin in the game. Having the sales tax revenue will help us explore money options with the state instead of just calling in a private bridge builder."
While the commission collectively balked at the idea of charging tolls to get off and on Navarre Beach, the existing bridge was a toll road until approximately 2006, when the state turned the structure over to the county and tolls were removed.
Gordon Goodin, the then-county commissioner who, along with then-state Rep. Ray Sansom, oversaw the transition of the bridge from state to county property, said it was never envisioned when the county took control of the span that at the time a new bridge was built, tolls wouldn't be collected to fund the new structure.
"We knew then that when the bridge was replaced we were going to reestablish the tolls," he said.
Previously: Delaware company has offered to construct a new Navarre Beach bridge
Goodin said the county was given no real choice but to take over the even then obsolete bridge from the state.
He and Sansom had approached FDOT to request that the tolls be removed since the collections were not benefiting either the state or the county and being used primarily just to pay the toll collectors. The FDOT district secretary at the time notified Goodin and Sansom the tolls being charged were of no consequence anyway because the bridge was going to be turned over to the county within a matter of a couple of years.
Goodin said that the negotiations with the state were successful in that, along with the Navarre Beach Causeway Bridge, the county received $4 million for its upkeep.
To this day, Goodin defends the actions taken in 2006.
"For anyone that believes the state wouldn't have forced the county to take the bridge, they need to know the state forced Santa Rosa County to take the state's secondary roads in the mid-'80s. Those roads are Soundside Drive, Hickory Hammock Road, Munson Highway and Chumuckla Highway," he said. "There wasn't any desire on our part to see if they were bluffing. We were able to negotiate for a nice cash supplement. It wasn't the deal we were looking for, but we made the most of what we were going to end up with anyway."
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Santa Rosa Commission rejects Navarre Beach toll bridge proposal
