Barnstable County Commissioners Giving Support to Bridge Plans

December 29, 2023

Sagamore Bridge. Mary Ierardi, CapeCod.com

BARNSTABLE – As the Barnstable County Commissioners look back on the year of 2023, one of the important topics that they feel has made significant improvements is the funding and ramp up for the replacement of the Bourne and Sagamore bridges.

Previous attempts to make progress on receiving funding for the project had been unsuccessful, says Mark Forest, Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, but Governor Maura Healey has made significant progress towards the ultimate goal.

“We’re excited about that. We get regular updates from the congressional delegation and clearly there’s a lot of work that’s been done on this initiative over the past year. We’re very excited about that and we’re very bullish on the prospect of things coming together,” said Forest.

Recently $372 million dollars in federal funding was approved for the Sagamore and Bourne bridge replacement project and there is also a federal application for approximately $1 billion dollars being worked on as officials continue to work towards the $4 billion dollar total replacement cost.

Forest believes the governor’s plan to start with the Sagamore Bridge first makes sense after looking over the plans with MassDOT and seeing that it is a well thought out plan, because not everything can be done at once, and the project will need to be in phases.

“Just in terms of the way the schedule lays out it makes sense to do the Sagamore bridge first, it makes a great deal of sense, both in terms of not just the funding, but also the interruption or managing of traffic during constructions,” Forest said.

He went on to say that he believes the funds will come together for both bridges, but did note that the federal government does not have any grant programs that will provide $4 billion in a lump sum to any individual project, so they will need to continue to get chunks of funding from a variety of sources to reach the goal figure.