Chairman of the Bridge Authority, Basil Longley, says that fees paid by heavy trucks may have to be adjusted in order to boost revenue to assist in funding necessary work on both bridges.

“But certainly we may need to look at fees, adjusting fees, to deal with that right. I mean cause the truckers are running a business they’re making money, right. All of this waste and everything else traverse the bridge and it is having an impact, we know that for sure, the amount of impact, we don’t know, that’s what the study will reveal.”

Longley says new assessments will be done of the bridges in 2023 including a traffic impact study. “We’re focusing on heavy, heavy equipment. When construction is going on, right there’ll be demolition of buildings and then you would have trucks coming over empty, when they leave, they leave loaded, right, with concrete, steel, everything on it. We don’t have any way of monitoring the weight of those vehicles now. Common sense would tell us that, you know, that is something that’s critical and we need to do it and the consultants that advise us as to the extend of what we need to do, how we do it, how we manage it.”