Organized Labor

By Paul Burton, Contributing Writer

The opening of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge West Approach in San Francisco was celebrated on April 11 with an official ribbon cutting ceremony with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums. The $429 million project of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is a seismic safety project to rebuild and reinforce the major freeway artery through downtown San Francisco.

Today we are celebrating a milestone for one of the most crucial and challenging public works projects in California’s history,” Schwarzenegger said.

The Bay Bridge is an economic and transportation colossus and we are rebuilding it to make it seismically safe for generations to come.

“The mile-long West Approach that we will open this weekend requires mind-boggling construction and engineering feats. I could not be more proud of the incredible workers who are making the West Approach of the bridge a reality, a full seven months ahead of schedule. This is exactly the type of skill and cooperation that the people of California expect and deserve from their government,” said Schwarzenegger
The West Approach retrofit project is one part of the overall $6.4 billion project to seismically upgrade the Bay Bridge. The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake caused the collapse of a 50-foot section of the eastern span. The project has been delayed by issues of cost, engineering, rights-of-way and, worker safety. In his comments, Mayor Newsom asked, “Who would have thought that we’d be here talking about good news about the Bay Bridge?”

He said, “So much has been written about the delays and the costs of the Bay Bridge, but now we have a different story about the costs being controlled; the timeline being resolved with a timeframe that now has been shortened by over seven months; a $429 million project that is going to come in at $429 million; a project that was done without the usual stress and consternation that usually is associated with projects of this type; a project where today you have residents not only celebrating its completion but making the case that they’re going to miss some of the construction workers that have become friends over the course of the last few years.”

Newsom thanked Caltrans Director Will Kempton and “all our friends in labor behind me, and Bobby Alvarado and his team, the folks at Caltrans that were here day in and day out, but also all the city workers.” Alvarado is Executive Officer of the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council and a member of the California Transportation Commission.

Kempton said, “This project represents the most complex construction staging job the department has ever accomplished; we did this work while commuters were using the facility. And while the commuters were using the facility, this work was done right around that mobility. I would like to say it’s like a changing a tire on a care that’s moving 65 miles an hour. The job involved tremendous teamwork and an unprecedented public outreach effort.”

“We also need to recognize the contractors, Tudor-Saliba, Jack Frost from the contractor’s offices here; we did this job as a team,” said Kempton.

The West Approach is a one-mile section of I-80 between Fifth Street and the beginning of the bridge anchorage at Beale Street. Seismic safety retrofit work on the West Approach involves completely removing and replacing a one-mile stretch of I-80, and three on- and three off-ramps, while 280,000 vehicles continue to use the bridge each day.

Prior to retrofitting, the West Approach had an upper and lower deck configuration from 3rd Street to the anchorage, with one foundation system supporting both decks. When the retrofit is completed, each deck will have an independent column and foundation support system. The roadway leading to the double decks between 5th and 3rd Streets will be similar to the East Span’s Skyway, with parallel concrete decks.
California Department of Transportation spokesman Bart Ney said that crews were performing intensive, round-the-clock work as hundreds of thousands of vehicles moved to and from the bridge each day. He said and additional challenge is accessing the work site with large construction equipment, because the work occurs in a highly-developed urban area.

To keep traffic flowing, and to enable work to occur within arm’s reach of office buildings and apartments, bridge builders are performing a “retrofit by replacement.” Much of this work is performed during the very late hours of the night and on weekends to minimize impacts to heavy commute-hour traffic. Work often involves significant rerouting of traffic from the existing structures to temporary bypasses or surface streets.

“The work that everyone has done is unrivaled, as there are not many projects this complex,” said Dale Bonner, California Business, Transportation and Housing Secretary. “I am very proud of the agencies, contractors and workers who have made this a reality.”

“There were plans for how to deliver this but as we went through them we reserved the right to improve the project. And our construction engineers worked very hard with Tutor Saliba and the city and county of San Francisco to make a better project,” said Ney.

Larry Lindstrom, a foreman for the Ironworkers crew working for subcontractor Harris Salinas Rebar and member of Ironworkers Local 377, said that, “ In order to replace the freeway and still keep traffic moving, work is done in strips.” He said the work currently being done was in the fifth of six stages. Full completion of the West Approach is scheduled for January 2009. Lindstrom said that up to 25 Ironworkers were on the job at peak construction times, with about 10 on the job now. Harris Salinas, based in Livermore, is also working on the Bay Bridge Skyway project east of Yerba Buena Island. The seismic retrofit project has created thousands of jobs.

“Not that long ago, people’s eyes would glaze over when they heard the word ‘infrastructure’,” said Governor Schwarzenegger. “But then the people of California made a commitment of $42 billion of infrastructure bonds to rebuild the state of California [in 2006]. Now everyone understands that a state can prosper and soar economically only if it has the roads, bridges, tunnels, transit, ports and other projects that make our daily lives and daily business possible. We have come a long way in just a few short years and we have much more to do.”

Schwarzenegger called on the federal government to increase investment in infrastructure. A press release from the governor’s office noted that, “The federal government has historically been the single largest contributor to national infrastructure projects, but its contribution has fallen dramatically over the past two decades.”

The governor said that earlier this year, Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined him to form a new bipartisan, multi-state coalition called, “Building America’s Future,” to rally support for federal infrastructure investment and put pressure on presidential candidates to increase federal support of infrastructure. “The bottom line is that America right now needs $1.6 trillion dollars to rebuild and to really invest in the future. We must get going, we must invest,” Schwarzenegger told the National Governors Association in January.

The governor said that rebuilding and expanding America’s infrastructure creates jobs, boosts incomes, enables goods movement, strengthens trade and helps the economy. He said he was committed to working with the legislature, labor and environmental leaders, builders, engineers and cabinet officials to find ways to overcome statutory and regulatory barriers to fast track the $29 billion in unallocated 2006 infrastructure bond funding.