In a specially convened meeting Wednesday evening, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors quickly passed a resolution supporting the replacement of the Advance Mills Bridge. The resolution, passed by a unanimous vote, was put together following the end of public comment on the bridge on July 22. The special meeting was convened in order to quickly show support and keep the ball rolling on the bridge construction. Clocking in at 15 minutes, it was one of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors’ shortest sessions ever.
Before voting on the resolution, Board members discussed possible designs for the bridge, including the brief mention of a covered bridge. However, supervisors dismissed the closed design as unfeasible, citing costs along with the time to study the structural effects to the bridge as too high.
 Supervisors held a special meeting to keep the bureaucracy moving on a new Advance Mills bridge. This one was shut down more than a year ago because of VDOT fears that it would fail. |
The bridge, which serves as a connector over the North Fork Rivanna River, has been out since April 2007, much to the chagrin of Albemarle County residents who regularly used the bridge to get to town.
“[Without the bridge], it divides the community in half,” says Ann Mallek, the supervisor whose district includes the area isolated by the bridge outage. “We have people who live on the north side whose mailboxes and grocery stores are on the south side, and there’s a nine-mile detour. It really has severed us.”
Paul “Kip” Newland, a member of the Advance Mills community, spoke on the lost bridge’s effect on local business. “It cut across all of the merchants who we dealt with. It hurt their business and it hurt our access because once we got on [Route] 29, we just went into Charlottesville and we didn’t patronize them anymore and that wasn’t good.”
“There was a lot of folks in the community who put a lot of pressure on our Board and indirectly on VDOT to do something on this bridge,” says Supervisor David Slutzky. “These are people that have been cut off from access to emergency vehicles and access to community and a whole lot of real-life consequences from having that bridge shut down.”
County officials expect the new bridge to be completed between fall 2009 and spring 2010. Plans originally called for a temporary bridge to be up in place by April 2008, with a permanent bridge up by 2011. But cost cutting led VDOT to ditch the temporary bridge and expedite the replacement: Officials estimate the construction of the one permanent bridge at $3 million will save $2 million.
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