BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto City Council has hired contractors to replace the Newell Road Bridge, a long-awaited step to protect homes from flooding on San Francisquito Creek.
The bridge from Edgewood Drive in Palo Alto to Woodland Avenue in East Palo Alto will go from 22 feet to 43 feet in width, with construction planned for next summer.
Council on Monday hired Granite Construction Company to replace the bridge for $9.4 million and Zoom Engineering to manage construction for $2.6 million.
The bulk of the funding is expected to come from Caltrans, but the money isn’t budgeted until the 2026-27 fiscal year. So the city will proceed without $10.4 million in hand and request reimbursement in October, Public Works Director Brad Eggleston told council.
The 114-year-old bridge has been a known chokepoint on San Francisquito Creek since 1998 when flooding damaged 1,700 properties.
This has been in the works since the 1990s. Given the caliber of leadership in this town, it will take another 30 years to get done. But by then downtown will look like Whiskey Gulch and there won’t be any point of using this bridge anyway. Think twice before voting in the next council election.
The reason it took so long is because radical environmentalists and selfish neighbors did everything they could to block it.