Multnomah County and its partner agencies in the Sellwood Bridge project have received an award for the public process conducted during the project’s planning phase. The award from the Federal Highway Administration will be presented to the agencies at the Board of County Commissioners meeting on Tuesday, January 24 at 10 a.m. at 501 S.E. Hawthorne Boulevard. FHWA’s Oregon Administrator Phillip Ditzler will present the award.

The Exemplary Human Environment Initiative awards recognize outstanding projects that make our transportation system work better for the people who use it while also protecting the natural environment.

The planning phase of the Sellwood project was honored in the process improvements category. FHWA cited the project for “building public and agency consensus around improvements for a multi-modal, community-driven and environmentally-sensitive infrastructure project.”

The award recognized the achievements of the bridge’s owner Multnomah County and its public agency partners during the planning phase: the City of Portland, Clackamas County, Metro, Tri-Met, Oregon Department of Transportation and FHWA.

When planning began in 2006, the Sellwood Bridge project faced many challenges. The bridge had serious structural problems, was inadequate for all traffic modes, and its owner, Multnomah County, had only secured a few million dollars in federal funds for planning.

There were political, physical, regulatory, financial and stakeholder challenges. These included the presence of homes within 20 feet of the narrow bridge and the location of the bridge within the City of Portland, a few blocks from Clackamas County, and connected to a state highway.

To find common ground, Multnomah County designed a decision process that brought together diverging agency and citizen agendas. The process achieved consensus among the public, stakeholders, agencies and elected leaders at each milestone in the planning phase. The successful process included:

• A Community Task Force made up of twenty stakeholder representatives that made recommendations
• A Policy Advisory Group comprised of elected and appointed officials from partner agencies that considered public input and made decisions at milestones
• An extensive public involvement program that provided citizens with information and opportunities to affect the project. More than 10,000 citizens shared their views via online surveys, open houses, workshops, briefings and other contacts with the project.

Citizens influenced the criteria that were used to select alternatives for study and one of those alternatives was suggested by the community. The final preferred alternative, which has two lanes, reflected the public’s desire for the scale of the project to mirror the scale of the community.

The selected alternative also reflects the Portland region’s focus on sustainability and environmental stewardship. The project will add capacity through alternative modes such as bicyclists, transit and pedestrians, rather than through more lanes for cars.

The preferred alternative was unanimously approved by the elected councils of the affected jurisdictions in 2009. In 2010 the planning phase ended with FHWA’s Record of Decision, identifying the preferred alternative from the Final Environmental Impact Statement.

The Sellwood Bridge project started construction last month. In December the U.S. Department of Transportation also awarded the project a $17.7 million TIGER grant, the seventh largest TIGER grant in the nation and the only one in Oregon.

For information on the Sellwood Bridge project visit www.sellwoodbridge.org.