Planners on the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program are expected to announce an updated price estimate on Monday during a committee hearing of the Washington state Legislature. The cost of the megaproject could rise by millions – or billions – of dollars since the last estimate was released in 2022.
The I-5 bridge replacement is facing a variety of headwinds, including rising material and labor costs, challenging budget climates in both Oregon and Washington, and a presidential administration that has, at times, been hostile to both Democratic-led states.
Where do things stand with the project?
In a January 2025 interview with OPB, Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle said she wanted to “put a shovel in the dirt” on the Interstate Bridge by September after the states cleared a key permitting milestone.
That didn’t happen. Construction on the new bridge is now planned to begin sometime in 2026, according to IBR documents. Hitting that deadline will require the project to clear some key hurdles, including its final design.
Exactly what the bridge will look like is still up in the air. Engineers are currently planning four bridge designs. They include a single versus double level bridge, as well as a fixed span bridge or a design with a lift that opens to allow ships to pass underneath.
The final design is expected early next year, pending a decision from the U.S. Coast Guard about Columbia River vessel traffic. IBR managers are pushing for a 116-foot-high continuous bridge. But that design would block traffic for a handful of marine companies that use this stretch of the Columbia River. If that plan proceeded, IBR would pay out around $140 million alone in compensation to those companies.
As an alternative, the Coast Guard is weighing the need for a lift bridge that would increase pass-through height under the bridge to 178 feet but cause the same traffic backups as the current bridge. The decision was further delayed this fall by the six-week government shutdown.
How much could the cost go up?
The last projection for the bridge’s price tag in 2022 was estimated to be $5-$7.5 billion. In the years since, the U.S. economy has seen steep inflation and the largest tariffs since the Great Depression. The project itself has faced ongoing delays, all of which drive up costs.
During a recent Oregon legislative transportation committee meeting, assistant administrator for the Interstate Bridge Replacement Ray Mabey described national industry trends where costs for large infrastructure projects have risen anywhere from 28-163% in just a handful of years.
“IBR will not be immune to some of these cost increases that we’re talking about,” Mabey said. “That’s what we’re trying to get our hands wrapped around on what that is to us and why.”
Tariffs on materials like steel and aluminum, and elevated labor costs for specialized skills like electrical work and heavy machinery operation, are driving cost increases on many large infrastructure projects, according to Macrina Wilkins. Wilkins is a senior research analyst with Associated General Contractors, a trade group representing the construction industry.
“The cost pressures aren’t particularly coming from a single source,” Wilkins said.
Creating a new price estimate is not simple because IBR staff are projecting into an uncertain future. Last month, Mabey said the administrators were evaluating over 100 different risk factors affecting the cost, ranging from which design is chosen to future inflation costs over the 15 years this project could take to be built.
Could nearby transportation projects affect the Interstate Bridge?
The IBR is far from the only transportation project in the Portland metro area facing challenging economic conditions. The Oregon Department of Transportation is struggling with a major budget gap that has led to hundreds of staff departures. There is also uncertainty over the future of ODOT’s Rose Quarter Improvement Project, a redesign of I-5 just south of the Interstate Bridge Replacement. The fate of that project will be decided on Thursday after it lost $450 million in federal funding in Congressional Republicans’ so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
Portland’s transit agency TriMet also announced layoffs and service cuts in November to address its own $300 million shortfall. TriMet’s light rail system is planned to extend onto the new I-5 bridge. Building a new transit line is still several years away, making cost projections “early estimates at best,” said TriMet representative Tyler Graf.
Representatives for both TriMet and the Rose Quarter project said their financial challenges would not cascade onto the Interstate Bridge Replacement.
“TriMet’s budget shortfall doesn’t affect our participation in the Interstate Bridge Replacement program,” Graf said.
Could light rail get cut from the project?
With rising costs on the Interstate Bridge, some in the region see removing light rail as a pragmatic solution. The addition of mass transit on a new bridge with stops into downtown Vancouver is by far the most controversial element of the bridge redesign.
Some residents and elected officials in Clark County who live outside Vancouver worry the project will cost too much in local transit taxes and that it will import criminal elements.
Cutting light rail from the plan won’t be easy. Mass transit is baked into an agreement for the bridge between agency partners in Oregon and Washington and is required under federal environmental rules. The agreement, known as the Modified Locally Preferred Alternative, includes targets for mass transit ridership and greenhouse gas reductions. Those estimates rely on light rail extending from the Portland Expo Center to the downtown Vancouver library.
Two critical funding sources for the bridge are the states of Washington and Oregon, which each have pledged $1 billion. Changing the MLPA could strain agreements between the states.
Project delays also could threaten $927 million in federal funds from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bridge Investment Program. The Interstate Bridge program has to meet a number of requirements by next October to secure that money. Added delays could jeopardize those grant funds, no matter what the bridge design ends up being.
Cutting light rail would likely cost the project support from transit advocacy groups, too, according to Chris Smith with No More Freeways.
“The [Environmental Impact Statement] is wholly dependent on transit to meet the environmental numbers they’ve set, so I would hope they would have to redo the EIS,” he said.
Redoing traffic modeling for the project would take more time and increase costs, according to Interstate Bridge Replacement Program spokesperson Kimberly Webb.
This barrier has led some to speculate that a so-called light rail ready project might be the best of both worlds, where lanes on the bridge are left available to build light rail in the future.
“Why not build the bridge that has capacity and in the future we can expand on that?” said Washington state Rep. David Stuebe, R-Camas.
The challenge, he said, is balancing the future need for this bridge with the cost to pay for it today.
“This bridge, when we build it, should last another 100 years,” Stuebe said. “Where are we going to be a hundred years from now? That’s what we need to be thinking.”
Building incrementally
The full Interstate Bridge Replacement spans five miles of projects connecting to I-5, a two-mile light rail extension and the bridge itself. According to Webb, the project will start with the bridge and “deliver these critical investments within the available funding.”
During his November discussion about the upcoming price tag before the Oregon Legislature, IBR assistant administrator Mabey said completing the project could take 15 years. That will outlast the current budget shortfalls in Oregon and Washington, funding freezes at the federal level and several presidential administrations. The program would look for additional funding sources to address rising costs and “start where we start.”
“We need to start with a bridge and work from there,” he said.
