The bistate Columbia River Crossing project has consumed $118 million without turning a single shovel full of dirt.
What did we get for all that money?
The Columbian requested all information related to project expenditures from the project office in Vancouver. This week, the newspaper received two discs full of hundreds of pages of invoices, receipts, time sheets, color-coded reports and other items describing expenditures since 2005.
As we pore over the data, we’re also making it available to the general public on our I-5 bridge project page (under CRC Expenses). We invite you to page through more than 350 files. If you find something that raises questions or causes concern, drop a line to erik.robinson@columbian.com.
The crossing is the biggest single public works project in the region’s history.
Now estimated to cost $3.6 billion, the overall project will replace the existing twin three-lane drawbridges with a 10-lane river crossing, extend Portland’s light-rail transit system into Vancouver and improve five miles of Interstate 5 across two states.
