DOT: Bridge wasn't feasible

Asked to referee a fight between a powerful coastal senator and an environmental group, the state Department of Transportation has sided with the senator.

Mostly.

DOT says the Southern Environmental Law Center was wrong when it claimed in a March 1 letter to PresidentBarack Obama that North Carolina would have built a new N.C. 12 bridge across Oregon Inlet by now - but for the intervention in 2003 of the state Senate leader, Sen. Marc Basnight of Dare County.

Jim Trogdon, DOT's chief operating officer, said Thursday that the state could not have built a 17-mile bridge favored by the environmental group. DOT had $120 million available in 2003 for a project then estimated to cost $260 million.

The 17-mile option would have been routed across Pamlico Sound to bypass a wildlife refuge. DOT had planned to build it until Basnight and Dare County officials objected and public opinion ran against it, Trogdon said.

State and federal officials later concluded that the Pamlico bridge would be much more costly than first thought - between $980 million and $1.8 billion, he said.

DOT now plans to spend $300 million on the first phase of a different bridge plan to be finished in future years.

"We can't build it all now because we don't have the money," Basnight said in an interview. "So let's piecemeal the project. Let's build one stage at a time, as we get the money, and complete the whole bridge in maybe 30 or 50 years."

Trogdon said the environmental group exaggerated the merits and understated the costs of the Pamlico bridge, and erred in calling it the "preferred alternative" of regulatory agencies.

"Even if the Pamlico Sound Bridge had complete support by all agencies and the public, and was the preferred alternative, which was not the case, NCDOT did not have adequate funds within the program at that time to build this alternative," Trogdon wrote Monday in a letter requested by Basnight.

Derb S. Carter, who heads the Chapel Hill office of the Virginia-based Southern Environmental Law Center, defended the group's letter to Obama. He questioned recent cost figures and cited an old DOT timetable that called for completion in 2010.

"We think everything we've said is supported by DOT's estimates," Carter said. "As to how much money DOT had at that time, DOT makes its own decisions on where it wants to spend money."

Although Trogdon defended Basnight against claims by the environmental group, he declined to endorse arguments Basnight made in a Feb. 24 letter to Obama.

Basnight protested that federal bureaucrats had delayed the bridge and cared less about public safety than "the litigious threats of out-of-state environmental groups." He warned that the old bridge could collapse, perhaps killing a busload of schoolchildren.

Trogdon said state and federal agencies are cooperating to address environmental questions and agree on the best way to build a new bridge. Meanwhile, he said, the old bridge is safe. "Yes it is," Trogdon said. "We carry traffic over that bridge every day."