Albany’s Covert Agenda: Theory? No. Question? Yes. 
By Martin Harris

For reasons going back to Vermont’s 18th century origins as an illegal liberty-and-property-focused secession from New Hampshire on its right (map-wise and politics-wise) , and New York on its left, (likewise) Vermont has no control over the bridges which connect it to those States. That shrinks liability for maintenance expense, but it grows vulnerability to policy decisions made elsewhere, like the one in Albany, which has just imploded the 80-year-old Lake Champlain Bridge into the liquid domain of the famed plesiosaur lurking below. The demolition came as quite a surprise to both Champ and the several hundred New York State residents who had been commuting to jobs in Vermont. The shutdown recommendation came in October;  a supporting "study" in November, demolition in December, and replacement with a similar two-lane design and restored vehicle usage is promised for the summer of 2011.

In the first news reports, bridge deficiency was ascribed to both pier deterioration and steel frame superstructure deterioration. If you look into the NYC consulting engineers’ reports you’ll find steel frame gusset plate connectors specifically mentioned. (Similarly, you may recall, it was gusset plate failure which was the primary cause of the I-35 bridge collapse in Wisconsin in 2007, which can be read in detail on the Web today.) In contrast, subsequent news stories mentioned only pier deterioration and, in fact, there’s only the briefest mention of gusset plates (page 19) and no discussion at all of steel frame questions in the NYDoT report on the Lake Champlain Bridge Project meeting of 13 Nov 09, while a full illustrated page is devoted to the flaws in the piers: "slender, unreinforced", "no pier armor", "iron-ore tailings for concrete aggregate" , and original "caisson placement". The report then lays out the "finding" that both pier and superstructure repair and reconstruction options are "dismissed" and demolition and replacement of both are required. At this point I was reminded of the Sherlock Holmes quote "the strange incident of the dog" in the Conan Doyle mystery novel Silver Blaze, the strange incident being that the dog didn’t bark when it should have. Neither did the NYSDoT report mention its own prior and successful use of deteriorated-concrete-bridge-pier encapsulation, some 20 years ago, for repairs on a very similar 1935 Susquehanna River Windsor Bridge near Binghamton. It worked. No explanation, in either the engineer’s summary report or the State report, not even a single use of the word "encapsulation", of why it wouldn’t work for the Lake Champlain Bridge.

Pier encapsulation in Broome County was comprised of a 12-inch-thick reinforced concrete surround and cap being poured all around and over the existing questionable piers, to prevent failure from expansion of existing cracks or surface deterioration. No discussion in the LCBP report of that option. If you want one, it’s on the Web (Reconstruction of Windsor Bridge Piers) posted by the Transportation Research Board.

It may be that the New York State "omerta" practice regarding encapsulation stems not from engineering but from politics, specifically from the State’s frustration with insufficiently-docile residents who selfishly work outside the State and don’t pay enough income tax inside the State, and that the "code of silence" regarding pier encapsulation which was dictated to the report-writers was intended to produce a recommendation that might confine those several hundred go-getters who have been commuting across the Lake into finding jobs back where their betters want them, at least for as long as possible (mid-2011), and after that keeping them profitably (for Albany, anyway) at home by means of suitably-high tolls on the expensive new bridge. I’ve had my own distasteful experiences with government report-purchasers (in one case the State Ed Department Commissioner Richard Gibboney, back in the 60’s) demanding that a hired study "find" and recommend what they want it to "find" and recommend.

None of this is proveable, of course, and so I raise it as a question and not as a documentable or even circumstantial theory. For substantiation, however, you need only review the tax adventures of New Yorkers who have earned income beyond the State’s boundaries, to get some flavor of Albany’s intense interest in taxing those earnings; similarly for those who have fled the State and found that the Department of Taxes won’t let them leave in fiscal peace. A similar pattern, I’m told, prevails for non-residents who commute for jobs into The Empire State and/or The Big Apple, with Albany demanding appropriate (in Albany’s view, of course) percentages of those earnings to balance all the incredibly burdensome costs generated by workers coming in to –ugh—work. 

As for the great pier engineering mystery, the consulting and reporting dog that didn’t bark, and the notion of covert-agenda fiscal motivations concealed by Albany "omerta" policy, my suspicion is that efforts to research any of these questions would not be graciously received in a "glasnost"-deficient Albany. However, it is (or used to be) a free country, and you are theoretically and supposedly welcome to try. 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights