Bridge Selection Committee's Unanimous Vote

On Wednesday the Thruway Authority presented to Governor Andrew Cuomo the three proposed designs for a new Tappan Zee Bridge.

One of these – proposal 1 – received the unanimous vote of the selection committee assigned this task.

The committee included Tarrytown's David Aukland, who serves on the village's planning board and offered this insight into the process and what’s to come.

• "I have been impressed throughout by the professionalism of the Authority's advisors, which helped us reach a unanimous recommendation quickly in this ground-breaking selection process."
• "It has been exciting to share the process with an exceptional team of professionals and community members."
• "In many ways, this has been the easy part; building the replacement bridge will take six long years, and it will be very important to assure a close relationship between local communities, the Authority and the builder. During the six years, many points will emerge that we shall need to resolve in a timely way, to be sure the schedule is maintained and that the impact on the community is as limited as is practical.”

Aukland added they are still working out the ways that the village, the Authority and the builder would work together. He said he could yet specify why the committee landed so decisively on option number one (with the lowest pricetag of $3.142 billion), though one could imagine it has something to do with the pricetag.

Wednesday’s release of the designs followed a decade of study until Cuomo fast-tracked the project in 2011. There have been 80 community meetings and counting. The three proposals under consideration came by way of an unwieldy 750,000 pages in boxes. Wednesday’s presentation luckily arrived in a photo-full 23-page PDF.

The Thruway Authority votes on the three proposals on December 17. What’s yours? Take our poll. 

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