Posted on 12/17/2017 7:53:56 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission has taken another step toward its planned new headquarters in Lower Makefield.
Commission officials recently awarded a contract not to exceed $529,869 to Joseph Jingoli & Son of Lawrence Township, New Jersey, to serve as construction manager on the project. The new 37,000-square foot, two-story commission headquarters building will be constructed at the 10-acre park-and-ride just off Interstate 95 the commission bought from Lower Makefield last year for $800,000.
Officials from the DRJTBC hope to award bids for the new building early next year and have it open by the summer of 2019. It will allow the commission to then convert its current Morrisville facility into a largely maintenance-only operation and its Solebury administration building into a back-office/support operation, commission officials said.
“Our goal is to create a functionally efficient, contemporary office building that will also satisfy our administrative and service needs long into the future,” commission Executive Director Joseph Resta said in a news release.
“The final design plans include many features that will not only reduce facility maintenance and utility costs, but will also be very aesthetically pleasing, creating a positive work environment for our administrative employees.”
The park-and-ride, near the Delaware River and the commission-operated Scudder Falls Bridge, is a spot where commuters meet and then carpool to their places of work all along the I-95 corridor in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and other locations.
The commission will keep the park-and-ride open and also do more than $500,000 worth of improvements on it, DRJTBC officials said. However, it will reduce the number of spaces available to commuters from 170 to 103.
A study done before the commission bought the park-and-ride showed that only about 40 to 45 commuters use the facility on a regular basis.
“It’s tremendously underutilized,” Resta had said.
There will be 120 parking spaces for commission employees at the new building, he added.
In addition, the commission plans to construct, at its expense, a bicycle/pedestrian path from the park-and-ride to the nearby Delaware Canal Park towpath along the south side of Woodside Road. That will add to recreational opportunities for residents, Lower Makefield supervisors have said.
The commission is in the midst of a $500-million Scudder Falls Bridge improvement project that includes construction of a new and much wider bridge, a widening of I-95 on the Pennsylvania side and other items. That project is slated for completion in mid-2021, DRJTBC officials said.
Resta has said it will be convenient to have the new headquarters so close to one of the commission’s largest bridges and to where the improvement project is going on.
The DRJTBC operates seven toll bridges and 13 free bridges across the Delaware River, two of which are pedestrian-only spans.
Not to be confused with the Delaware River Port Authority, based in Camden, which operates its own set of toll bridges.
Bureaucratic waste.
Hmmm... Having seen the following info, I reconsider my claim that the commission is a bureaucratic waste:
The agency’s jurisdiction stretches roughly 140 miles (230 km) along the Delaware River, from the Philadelphia/Bucks County, Pa. boundary northward to the New Jersey/New York state line. The DRJTBC currently operates seven toll bridges and 13 toll-supported (free) bridges (two of which are pedestrian-only crossings). Revenues from the seven toll bridges subsidize the other bridges. The agency does not receive any state or federal tax revenues and relies solely on toll collections for its financing.[1] In 2007, more than 141 million cars and trucks used the DRJTBC’s network of Delaware River bridge crossings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_River_Joint_Toll_Bridge_Commission
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