New Congressional report stresses the need to replace aging Cape Cod bridges, lawmakers say

A new Congressional report is stressing the need to replace the aging Bourne and Sagamore Bridges on Cape Cod, with the report noting “failure to replace the bridges would be catastrophic,” lawmakers said Tuesday.

The report, titled “Cape Cod Bridges Replacement: An Urgent Need,” was released by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and Rep. Bill Keating.

The report drew input from Cape Cod leaders on how the aging Cape Cod bridges are impacting local communities, businesses, and residents, the lawmakers said in a statement.

The current state of the heavily-traveled bridges to Cape Cod “poses dire economic consequences, and reiterates calls to fund replacement efforts,” the lawmakers said.

“The Cape Cod Bridges replacement is key to modernizing Massachusetts’ physical infrastructure to meet the economic, social, and environmental challenges of the 21st century,’’ the lawmakers wrote. “Innaction is untenable. The Cape Cod bridges replacement project is at a pivotal moment, and federal and state actors must come together to secure the funding needed to carry out the replacement and alleviate the current situation that is negatively impacting thousands of residents and millions of visitors annually.”

The Bourne and the Sagamore Bridges, owned by the federal government, were built in 1933.

The bridges are the sole access point for the more than 35 million vehicles that cross the canal each year, and serve as the main gateway to Cape Cod for more than 260,000 Cape and Islands residents and over 5 million visitors annually, lawmakers wrote.

“They are vital assets for the Cape Cod economy and surrounding communities, and also serve as essential routes for general transportation, tourism, and evacuations in case of an emergency. However, the current bridges are nearly 90 years old, functionally obsolete, and require increasingly costly and disruptive maintenance,” the lawmakers wrote.

For the report, officials sought input from the Cape Cod community -- including state and local elected officials, Tribal leaders, and community organizations -- about how the aging Bourne and Sagamore Bridges are impacting communities, businesses, and residents on and around Cape Cod.

Based on their responses, the report found:

• The Cape Cod Bridges are of significant importance to businesses and communities. Every stakeholder that responded affirmed the vital nature of the Bridges to their communities. As noted by the Cape Cod Commission, “The importance of the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges to the region cannot be overstated – the long-term viability of Cape Cod is inextricably linked to the health and fate of both bridges.”

• The current state of the bridges is hurting Cape Cod businesses and communities. The regular closures of lanes on the bridge for maintenance clearly has an impact on businesses that cannot just be measured in terms of monetary value lost, but also in terms of the decreased quality of life of employees who keep the economy moving.

• The current state of the bridges is negatively impacting residents. In tandem with the economic impacts of the bridges on local businesses and their employees, residents on the Cape and Islands generally are impacted by the current state of the bridges in their daily lives, with implications for their access to food, goods, and essential services.

• The current state of the bridges impacts emergency services and access to healthcare, and is a public health and public safety risk. Because the bridges serve as the lifeline connecting the rest of Massachusetts to Cape Cod and are “the only emergency route off of Cape Cod,” the “gridlock caused by bridge congestion adds a dangerous amount of time to the…ability to respond to emergencies.

• Failure to replace the bridges would be catastrophic. As summarized by the Barnstable County Board of Regional Commissioners, “If the bridges continue to deteriorate and are not replaced, the region will experience devastating economic impacts due to more frequent closures for repairs, disruption of commuter and tourism travel, increased costs for transportation of goods, and lack of critical access to medical and emergency services.”

• Replacing the bridges would have significant benefits for residents and the economy. This replacement stands to greatly benefit those same communities that are currently suffering. According to the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, their members noted that replacing the bridges is “a matter of survival” for their businesses. The Chamber stated that “Replacing the 88-year-old, functionally obsolete Bourne and Sagamore Bridges will provide a sense of certainty for Cape Cod’s regional economy, which supports nearly 10,000 businesses, a labor force of 117,797, and a $1.5 billion tourism industry that, in 2022, generated $181 million in state and local tax revenue - second in the state only to Greater Boston.”

The lawmakers said Warren has led efforts over the past several years to secure funds to replace the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges, which has included pressing the federal government to take action to replace the bridges.

Among their efforts, the lawmakers in September sent a letter of support to Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg supporting Massachusetts’ application and urging the department to provide funding to the The Cape Cod Bridges Program to replace the Sagamore and Bourne Bridges.

In May, Warren, Markey and Keating, and Rep. Seth Moulton sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, urging him to support installation resilience in order to provide funding for the replacement of the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges.

Also in May, the lawmakers sent a letter to the Federal Highway Administration, requesting them to expedite feedback from the technical review requested by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Massachusetts Department of Transportation of the Cape Cod Canal Bridges project, which seeks to explore the scope, schedule and cost of the Cape Cod Bridges Project.

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