The Abridged version:
- The Freeport Bridge will be closed on weekdays through November.
- The closure comes after months of delays in the construction timeline for structural repairs to the bridge.
- To avoid the closed bridge, commuters will have to drive south to the Paintersville Bridge or north through West Sacramento.
Commuters who rely on the Freeport Bridge might be in for a long November.
After months of delays, local agencies are beginning structural repair work on the heavily used river crossing. From Nov. 2 through Nov. 30, the Freeport Bridge will be closed 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every weekday.
The closure leaves those traveling during that time with limited options for crossing the Sacramento River to and from places like Clarksburg. Drivers can either head about 13 miles south to the Paintersville Bridge, or north through West Sacramento on Jefferson Boulevard, which has its own ongoing construction.
“It’s going to be a huge inconvenience and it’s going to last a whole month,” said one Clarksburg resident at a Yolo County Board of Supervisors meeting this month.
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Months of delays
The Freeport Bridge repair project has been in the works since at least January.
That’s when Sacramento County, which is spearheading the project and splitting the cost with Yolo County, approved plans for repairing damage to deck welds that were discovered at the centerline of the bridge span during a routine inspection as well as the bridge’s pins and rollers.
The original plan was for the construction to be done “at night under a full road closure and return to normal operation at the end of each shift,” according to a county staff report.
Officials estimated the project would be done in June and cost roughly $400,000 total.
But when the county advertised the contract for the project, it received five bids that were all over the initial estimate.
“We just found that the previous bids were too high,” said Matt Robinson, spokesperson for Sacramento County.
So, the county rejected all bids and raised its estimate to $480,000 at the end of May. After receiving six bids and awarding a contract based on that amount, however, the U.S. Coast Guard told the county that its plan was unworkable in the summer due to an ongoing levee repair upstream.
For construction on the levees to continue, the Freeport Bridge needed to be able to open for boat traffic, meaning it couldn’t be out of commission over the summer.
The Coast Guard told Sacramento County it could complete the work in November. In the colder fall weather, construction would have to happen during daylight hours.
Based on the changes, the county retracted its previously awarded contract.
“We were overridden and told ‘no’ by the Coast Guard,” said Yolo County Supervisor Oscar Villegas at the October meeting.
In the meantime, more damage was discovered on the Freeport Bridge, enough to make the county raise its budget once again to $850,000. Finally, at the end of August, a contract was awarded to Accelerated Construction & Metal for just under $680,000.
Short notice
During the back and forth, the Freeport Bridge remained open.
“If it wasn’t safe, we wouldn’t have left it open,” Robinson said. “The bridge was still safe per the structural engineer.”
But because of the delays in awarding the contract, neither Yolo nor Sacramento County was able to alert residents of the closure until the end of October.
The news caught residents and some officials by surprise.
“We too were a little bit shocked,” Villegas said. “This all evolved very quickly.”
Yolo County will split the cost of the repair with Sacramento County.
