- Ted, it's good to have you back.

I know the last few months we've joked that the Weekly Insight segment should be renamed the Washington Bridge Update.

But it's finally official, the Washington Bridge westbound will have to be demolished and ultimately replaced.

- Yeah and you know, as much as we've been telegraphing this was probably coming, Michelle, it's really striking how far we've come from those early weeks when they said, "We found the problem, we can repair it quickly, "it'll be reopened in three months."

Now we're talking about demolishing the whole bridge and building a new one.

- State Transportation Director Peter Alviti estimates that the cost to rebuild this bridge will be between 250 and $300 million.

He cautions, "Look, this is an estimate.

It could be more."

But this will be paid for by state funds and also federal funds, a combination.

- And we expect a majority of federal funds.

But you know, I think it's important to stress, as you alluded to there, Michelle, that these are very, very heavily caveated estimates of how long it will take to build the bridge and how much it will cost because nobody who's actually gonna do any construction has laid eyes on the bridge and the plans yet.

This was from the engineers who looked at the problems with the bridge.

And it'll be until probably July before bidders have come back, said how much they think it will cost and how long they think it will take to do the bridge.

That's when we'll probably start to get some firmer numbers.

- So with that caveat in mind, Alviti is saying that they expect the bridge to be completed by March of 2026 to September of 2026.

Of course, the timing is interesting because we know September of 2026, we have a gubernatorial primary.

And so of course Dan McKee is up for reelection.

So you know, you wonder about the timing.

- You can't take the politics out of politics, Michelle, right?

And we know how frustrated many voters are, especially those who live in the Washington Bridge zone on either side of Providence and East Providence.

East Providence can be kind of a swing area in Democratic primaries.

And so I think, you know, a lot will depend.

It's obvious to say but does this project go smoothly and quickly and maybe people's memories fade of the frustrations they felt initially or do they run into hurdles?

And this is something Dan McKee is struggling with, all the way up to that primary.

- Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was recently in town visiting the bridge.

You had a chance to press him one-on-one about the tens of millions of dollars, Ted, that have already been spent on repairing the bridge.

Of course, we now know we're looking at rebuilding the bridge.

Let's take a listen to that conversation.

- $37 million was spent rebuilding the deck of this bridge, even though it turns out that the inspections had not been enough to make clear that this bridge was not gonna survive and it shouldn't have been repaired.

It should have been rebuilt.

You know, should US DOT be that blase about that amount of federal money being lost on a project that should have been rebuilt from the start?

- My point is that I never believe that investing in repairing critical infrastructure is a waste of money.

But of course, if DOT had known that this bridge would need to be torn down, there would've been a different plan.

But we don't enter into these situations with perfect information, especially a bridge like this that was built with a unique design, possibly the only one of its kind in the country, which turns out that it was uniquely disguising some of the issues that were on the inside.

- Ted, that doesn't sound like Secretary Buttigieg, at least right now, is holding anyone accountable for this.

- No, not really and I think, you know, of course he's trying to keep all the stakeholders happy up here, you know, federal, state relations and all that.

But I think that's really the next shoe to drop here, Michelle, along with as we talked about getting more official cost estimates and timing estimates.

It's accountability.

The governor in the news conference signaled he was calling for quote, "A day of reckoning "for those who have responsibility for the bridge."

But if you listen closely, he was talking about litigation and lawyers and it sounds like he's gonna be focused heavily on the contractors who inspected the bridge and were doing the work on the bridge as opposed to DOT itself.

- Right.

But who oversees those contracts?

- Well and I think that's gonna be the tension, right, Michelle, is okay, yes, the contractors maybe didn't get everything right but should someone have had the oversight to know that that was happening and where does the buck really stop?

I think that's what's gonna be the storyline coming up.

- Right, who in state government should be held accountable.

Thank you so much, Ted.

I appreciate it.

- Good to be here.

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