While Laughlin and Bullhead City are in different states, they share a local economy, with Laughlin residents forced to do a lot of their shopping in Bullhead City and several Bullhead City residents working in Laughlin.

The two communities, separated by the Colorado River, now have a second bridge between them to facilitate traffic and help spur economic development.

Construction on the $60.6 million bridge started in 2021 even though federal funding for it was designated in the 1990s.

It was 1987 when the late Don Laughlin funded the construction of this bridge connecting Bullhead City to the town of Laughlin, named in the resort owner's honor.

More than 30 years later and about eight miles south, there's now a second bridge between the Nevada township and Arizona city called Silver Copper Crossing.

-Oh, the bridge is going to be the most wonderful thing if we don't have any shopping in Laughlin.

So all of our purchases have to be made in Bullhead City.

This bridge will enable us to get here much faster.

-For public transit, it means a lot.

We have our paratransit service, and it's basically serving all the disabled residents of Laughlin.

And they have a lot of life sustaining services that they receive in Bullhead.

-Four-three-two-one... [crowd cheers] -To celebrate the bridge opening, firefighters sprayed water cannons from boats in the Colorado River below while residents danced... [band playing] ...and, of course, drove... [motorcycles revving] ...across the 724-foot-long link between Laughlin and Bullhead City.

This celebration decades in the making, as it was the late U.S.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and the late U.S.

Senator John McCain of Arizona who pledged their support for this bridge back in the 1990s.

-The first two weeks I was in office, over five years ago now, I made a trip to Laughlin, visit with residents, and this was the first thing I heard about, because they've been promised this, frankly.

For over 20 years, they've been told that there would be a connection to these two thriving and growing areas.

And what the killer was, was it was funding.

-Michael Naft is a Clark County Commissioner whose district includes Laughlin.

-Our government moves slowly, but not typically this slowly.

I think there were a variety of factors that delayed this project.

There were certainly politics involved.

There were other kinds of decisions that had to be made along the way, but at the end of the day, what did it for me was, one, the need was great, the need for emergency access, if nothing else.

The fact that we only had one public bridge that connected these two major areas.

In the event of emergency, I need to be able to get my residents to the hospital.

The closest way is across the Colorado River.

And then you look at the future outlook, the economic development opportunities for the area.

-Was it your responsibility to get this done?

When there's federal funding that's impacting two states, who takes it upon themselves to get it done?

-Well, I think everything at the end of the day falls on us.

You know, we all have responsibility, shared responsibility.

But at the time the earmark was provided, it would have been enough to cover the full funding of the bridge.

That was the intention.

Meanwhile, all these years go by.

As you know, the cost of everything has gone up, and so that's why it required additional support from Clark County to actually get it done.

-And for Clark County taking the lead, locals say they're thankful... -I mean, it's going to really change my life better, because I don't want to keep wasting gas.

Instead of driving to that bridge, I'll be taking this bridge from now on.

-...and hopeful for the potential impact this infrastructure could have.

-My hopes are that more and more people are able to come not just Laughlin to Bullhead, but Bullhead to Laughlin also.

I'd like to hope there's some development in Laughlin also.

We could use it.

We're kind of stagnated.

I don't know if I'm supposed to say that, but we're just at a lull.

And the water situation has not helped a lot.

-As for why this bridge took so long to complete, the Associated Press said that the original site had to be thrown out in 2008 because there was a public park there that would have not allowed for the use of federal funding.

The AP says that it took Bullhead City several years to determine a new site, which Laughlin officials didn't like because of how far it was from the casinos and businesses.

Clark County, though, reportedly refused to back off its commitment, and so construction started in 2021.

I reached out to you when I heard about this.

1990s there's federal funding.

2024 it's finally opening?

Is this typical of transportation infrastructure projects?

-This seems a little long for the issues you talked about there, but, yeah, it takes a while.

It takes a while to plan them, to get all the environmental planning, all those sort of, those sort of barriers there.

And then there's such a backlog of need, right?

So in these things, you know, as Commissioner Naft discussed, every, you know, you budget them at one point in time, by the time you get to them, the funding, the amount of money you need, is increased dramatically there.

Then you've got to figure out how are we going to patch this together here?

So it's a real challenge.

And you know, we're at a disadvantage in the West, particularly in some of the newer parts of the West, the Sun Belt, that we don't have a lot of history of getting a lot of federal funding for this.

So, you know we were-- in Phoenix and Las Vegas during Federal Highway Act in the 1950s, they were seen as too small to create an interstate between them.

Now we're trying to remedy that, and it's-- -With the I-11.

-Exactly.

So we're sort of playing catch up there.

There's a lot of federal money on the table for bridge repair, right, but not so much-- it's unclear how much that's going to go for new bridges and those sort of issues.

-Which I was so surprised to learn that there is no funding for the I-11 in Arizona.

No funding!

I've been seeing that-- -The route hasn't been determined either.

So they're still determining that as well.

-But then, looking into some of what's happening in Clark County, the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada told Clark County, You have sent me, like, a list of about $2 billion worth of projects that you do not have funding-- we do not have funding identified for.

This is-- okay.

Let's get into the funding aspect and worries you about this.

-Well, I think what makes this, this is an interesting project, right, is the connectivity between Arizona and Nevada.

And we know that in the next decades, more and more goods are going to be coming up through Arizona through Mexico.

Mexico is now our biggest trading partner.

That is one of the motivations for I-11.

Until you get that, you're going to have to sort of make these sort of piecemeal projects to sort of get that there.

But this, you know, our connectivity to Arizona and California is the key to our economic development here.

So that's where we're, where we're thinking about where do we put those assets.

And you're seeing this right now.

So NDOT is doing a planning study on the sort of area around Jean.

There's going to be development coming in there, and they're playing catch up.

They're thinking about, what is Brightline going to do when that comes in through there?

How does that change the corridor and all those sort of needs here?

So the studying is going on and then the planning and then, ultimately, finding that funding.

-Okay.

And how are these improvements and these roadways funded currently in Nevada?

-Yeah.

It depends what you're talking about, right?

So we're talking sort of within Clark County.

You're really looking at the RTC on that one there.

And their concern right now is going to be the fuel tax indexing, the local part of that is set to expire.

That needs to be renewed to be able to carry forward those projects there.

If you're talking about highways and bridges, you're generally talking about state and federal dollars there.

And the concern there, of course, is that those funding streams are based, of course, on the gas tax, which are not tied to inflation.

They are set, right?

And so what we see as we promote electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles and miles increases, the amount of funding to support the state highway fund, the federal highway fund, those are continuing to decrease.

No one has figured that out, how to square that there.

So you've seen, you know, a lot of the IIJA, for example, a lot of, Oh, transportation.

It's really trying to plug in a lot of those holes that, for a lot of projects in Nevada and elsewhere, that just don't have the funding.

-And quickly, the result of your study found that the lack of manufacturing in this region has such a negative impact on our transportation.

How are they related?

-Yeah.

So we-- GOED commissioned us, CBER, and the UNLV Transportation Research Center to do what became the Southern Nevada Regional Industrial Study.

It was supposed to look at how can we diversify the economy here, particularly through manufacturing.

We know we have a lot of logistics here as well, but we were really interested in the manufacturing piece.

And one of the problems Nevada has is there's we don't export things.

So everything that comes into Nevada comes on a truck, generally from Southern California.

And even though we have a train that runs right through the middle of town, it doesn't stop here, because there's nothing to pick up.

So we were thinking about how's a way we can bend the economic sort of curve to make this more appealing for rail.

And that means we have to produce big items that need to go elsewhere there.

And that would get a lot of the truck traffic potentially off of the I-15.

We know Brightway-- Brightline is going to alleviate some of that car traffic, but if you've driven the I-15, how many Amazon trucks do you see going back and forth from the ports and the warehouses in Southern California?

-They're driving right on through, leaving polution.

-Exactly.

And chewing up our roads and all those sort of issues there.

So we were trying to, looking at creative ways that we can diversify the economy but also leave some of the stress on the existing infrastructure.

-David Damore, I wish we had more time to discuss this, but we have run out of time.

Thank you for joining us.