TACOMA — The third bridge built over the Tacoma Narrows turned 10 on Saturday without the fanfare that marked its opening, and a region’s eyes remain trained on how it’s doing.
The answer is mixed.
The bridge’s structure remains solid — its life has far outstripped that of its famous predecessor, Galloping Gertie — and commuters fill its lanes every weekday.
But traffic and toll collections have fallen far short of what state officials projected before 2007.
The state Department of Transportation said it remains on track to pay off the bridge’s debts by 2032.
The head of the committee that makes toll recommendations for the bridge, however, said the paucity of bridge traffic could reverberate one day with toll hikes or pleas to the Legislature for more money.
To assess the bridge’s financial state, the News Tribune compared a consultant’s traffic projection for the state Department of Transportation in 2006 with the reported traffic through this March.
It found the bridge will have to see 27 million drivers — nearly two years’ worth of traffic — between April and December 2017 to catch up to early expectations.
“The traffic hasn’t materialized,” said Bruce Beckett, chairman of the bridge’s Citizen Advisory Committee, which is in charge of making toll rate recommendations.
Instead of nearing 17 million vehicles a year as predicted, the bridge has not yet had a 15 million-vehicle year, Beckett noted.
As a result, revenue from tolls is well behind what was originally predicted.
The bridge was projected to be taking in a little more than $100 million a year in tolls by now. It isn’t close. After the last toll increase, in July 2015, revenues for the next year were about $78 million. As of March, the bridge was on pace to bring in about $82 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30.
The life-of-the-bridge toll collections by the end of March were $537 million. That’s about $225 million short of what the 2006 projection said would be in bridge coffers by the end of this year.
The causes of this shortfall are debatable.
Transportation Department officials point to the unpredicted late-2000s recession that slowed the region’s growth as a key reason traffic was down.
The state remains on track to have the tolling wrapped up in 15 years, on schedule, Transportation Department spokeswoman Meredith McNamee said.
However, any deeper revenue shortfalls could mean tolling takes longer, get more expensive or both.
“The state holds a whole lot of essentially zero-coupon bonds to finance the bridge, with a debt repayment schedule that was in some respect predicated on more traffic on the bridge than has actually materialized,” Beckett said.
The tolls will go away when the bridge’s construction accounts are settled. That comprises $691 million in bond debt for construction and $58.87 million in deferred sales tax to the state, Pierce County and Tacoma for labor and materials charges.
