The city of Tacoma is in a budget crisis and can’t even fill potholes, but they can maintain unnecessary bridges? What, all because they got some free money? Given by a country (read taxpayers) laboring under massive, unsustainable debt.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be funny, but I still got a chuckle from the item about the delayed opening of the Hylebos Bridge. The clever headline caught my attention and the following short explanation was as humorous as it must have been embarrassing to the engineers in charge of the project.

Perhaps deciding they could save some money by reducing the weight of the materials used for the new paving and sidewalks, they unwittingly interfered with the delicate and very important balance between the bridge deck and the concrete counterweights needed to operate the opening and closing of the spans.

Now I wonder how much 13 tons of steel added to the spans to correct the problem is going to cost. I suggest the first thing to roll across the bridge when it opens should be the heads of some rather incompetent city engineers.