CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The West Virginia Department of Transportation has announced work will soon get underway on eight bridges in the city of Huntington. The spans are owned by the city, but the state Division of Highways will do the work and the federal government will foot the bill.
“The gist of it is they (feds) gave us a pile of money to work on our bridges and they also allowed 15-percent minimum to be applied to ‘non-state owned’ bridges,” said Transportation Secretary Jimmy Wriston.
The program is a bucket of the Federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which was passed in 2021. Wriston said the program fits West Virginia perfectly because of the abundance of aging bridges in the state and the lack of dollars to fix them.
“Anybody who owns these bridges won’t have to have a match. They are 100-percent federally funded so the local municipalities are going to be able to get these bridges rehabbed or maybe even replaced and aren’t going to have to spend their own money and stretch their own budgets,” he said.
The Huntington bridge rehab projects consist of two bridges in Wilson Court, the Enslow Boulevard Bridge, Whitaker Boulevard Bridge, Beechwood Bridge, Harvey Road Bridge, Madison Avenue Bridge, and the 12th Street Bridge in Ritter Park. Those are the latest of 88 bridge rehab projects ongoing or which will soon be ongoing around the states.
“The first step we did was to reach out to the municipalities and we’ve entered agreements to allow us on their bridges to do the work for them and the federal government will pay the bills,” Wriston said.
Wriston said the deadline for the bridge projects to get into the pipeline is September 2026 and there is a three year window afterward to complete the construction. However, he said during the meantime, the federal government will be busy working on another six year appropriation plan.