The purpose of this process is to promote species conservation and environmental enhancements for the OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program. Bat habitat enhancements applied in the field throughout the state will be presented as an example of these efforts.

The OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program is part of the Oregon Department of Transportation’s 10-year, $3 billion Oregon Transportation Investment Act program. OTIA funds will repair or replace hundreds of bridges, pave and maintain city and county roads, improve and expand interchanges, add new capacity to Oregon’s highway system, and remove freight bottlenecks statewide. About 17 family-wage jobs are sustained for every $1 million spent on trans¬portation construction in Oregon. Each year during the OTIA program, construction projects will sustain about 5,000 family-wage jobs.

Oregon Bridge Delivery Partners (OBDP) is a private-sector firm that has contracted with the Oregon Department of Transportation to manage the $1.3 billion state bridge program. OBDP, a joint venture formed by HDR Engineering Inc. and Fluor Enterprises Inc., will ensure quality projects at least cost and manage engineering, environmental, financial, safety, and other aspects of the state bridge program.

OBDP has developed a framework to integrate the myriad of tools developed for the Program, including environmental performance standards, a joint batched-programmatic biological opinion, environmental and engineering baseline reports, and a web-based GIS. The purpose of this framework is to identify environmental concerns early in the project development process and communicate these concerns to design teams and regulatory agencies to promote environ¬mental stewardship through impact avoidance and minimization.

Innovative and creative use of technology has been a keystone to the framework. Environmental professionals input the relevant environmental data for a project in a comprehensive, on-line Pre-Construction Assessment (PCA). The data are used to identify project challenges (e.g., archaeological sites or wetlands within the project footprint) and compile electronic reports to the regulatory agencies. Environmental metrics, such as exempted T&E species take and wetland fill quantities, are tracked using the GIS database. One framework meets the needs of many stakeholders.

Now with over two and a half years of execution, we have some great successes and lessons learned to share. The focus of this presentation will be on our species conservation and environmental enhancement identification process with bat habitat presented as a case study. Through early planning and coordination with our regulatory and resource agency partners, OBDP has integrated enhancement opportunities into project design. This enhancement request process has been developed to work with both of the dominant project delivery methods: design-bid-build and design-build.

Through this process, regulatory and resource agency liaisons are sent a pre-field information packet so they can solicit input from their agency cohorts. A group field visit is then facilitated by an OBDP environmental coordinator. All com¬ments collected from the field and the inquiries are uploaded into a tracking database. The enhancement requests are screened and classified for future actions, such as accept without change to scope, schedule, or budget or request ad¬ditional scope, schedule, or budget. Those requests that are approved are integrated into the project contract, whereas those that denied are passed on to alternative groups, such as the ODOT region, maintenance district, or headquarters for future potential action.

To date, all requests have been collected, entered into the database, and classified. This presentation will focus on the bat habitat elements integrated into the bridge design. More than a half-dozen bridges have had various bat habitat elements incorporated into their designs. None of the 15 bats in Oregon are listed as threatened or endangered these efforts are strictly enhancements with the hope of avoiding the need for future listing. Many bats, including the Townsends big-eared bat (Corynorhinus townsendii; endangered in Washington, sensitive in Oregon), have been known to use ODOT bridges for both day and night roosts as well as maternal colonies. We will present the process we have developed, the environmental performance standard that directs the designers, and the final product integrated into actual bridges.

The OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program is part of the Oregon Department of Transportation’s 10-year, $3 billion Oregon Transportation Investment Act (OTIA) program. In 2003, the Oregon Legislature enacted the third Oregon Transportation Investment Act, or OTIA III. The package includes $1.3 billion for bridges on the state highway system. During the next eight to 10 years, ODOT’s OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program will repair or replace hundreds of aging bridges on major corridors throughout Oregon. Oregon Bridge Delivery Partners (OBDP) is a private-sector firm that has contracted with the Oregon Department of Transportation to manage the $1.3 billion state bridge program. OBDP, a joint venture formed by HDR Engineering Inc. and Fluor Enterprises Inc., will ensure quality projects at least cost and manage engineering, environmental, financial, safety, and other aspects of the state bridge program. During the first 12 months of execution, OBDP has developed a framework to integrate the myriad of tools previously developed by ODOT for the Program, including environmental-performance standards, a joint batched-programmatic biological opinion, environmental and engineering baseline reports, a comprehensive mitigation and conservation strategy, and a web-based GIS. The purpose of this framework is to identify environmental concerns early in the project-development process and communicate these concerns to design teams and regulatory agencies to promote environmental stewardship through impact avoidance and minimization. Innovative and creative use of technology has been a keystone to the framework. Environmental professionals input the relevant environmental data for a project in a comprehensive, online Pre-Construction Assessment (PCA) that links to a GIS database. The data are used to identify project challenges (e.g., archaeological sites or wetlands within the project footprint) and compile electronic reports to the regulatory agencies. Environmental metrics (such as exempted T and E species “take” and wetland mitigation debits/credits) are tracked using the GIS database. One system meets the needs of multiple stakeholders. Three “levels” of the PCA have been developed that coincide with the stages of project development. The initial submittal (Level 1 PCA) identifies critical environmental concerns and permitting constraints. The second submittal (Level 2 PCA) outlines the solutions to the earlier concerns. The final submittal (Level 3 PCA) includes the project specifications necessary to comply with the Program-specific and standard environmental permits. Phasing the submittals in this way allows early and continuous communication between the design teams and the regulatory agencies, thereby promoting environmental stewardship through collaboration and coordination. This electronic system allows the OBDP Environmental Team to verify that each environmental regulation is addressed, identify environmentally sensitive projects and project elements, track critical environmental metrics, and communicate with the regulatory community. The technological component of this framework has been a cornerstone of the Environmental Management System (EMS) developed for the Program. This system can be easily applied to other programs within ODOT and other DOTs.

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) concluded a study in 2001 of the condition of Oregon bridges nearing the end of their design life—those built in the late 1940’s to the early 1960’s. Funded under the first two phases of the Oregon Transportation Investment Act (OTIA I and II), this study found varying degrees of shear (diagonal cracking) in a large number of the state’s bridges. In July 2003, Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski signed legislation authorizing OTIA III, a $2.5 billion transportation package, including $1.3 billion to repair or replace over 400 bridges under the OTIA III State Bridge Delivery Program (Bridge Program) over the next 10 years. Timely completion of environmental regulatory permitting was critical to meet the Bridge Program’s aggressive construction schedule. To facilitate this, ODOT and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) began working with a number of federal and state regulatory and resource agencies in late 2002 to develop permitting strategies that would meet the dual goals of timely review of individual permitting and protection and enhancement of fish and wildlife habitat. In addition to coverage under the Federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), the preferred regulatory compliance approach needed to ensure compliance with other state and federal statutes designed to protect fish, wildlife, and plant species and their habitat, including the Oregon ESA, Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), and Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act. As a contractor to ODOT, Mason, Bruce & Girard, Inc. (MB&G) worked closely with ODOT and other state and federal agencies from 2003 through 2004 to prepare a programmatic Biological Assessment (BA) for the Bridge Program. Critical to the BA was the development of a set of environmental performance standards designed to minimize and avoid impacts to ESA listed species. In addition, a fluvial performance standard was developed to ensure that bridges replaced under the OTIA III Program would enhance, not simply maintain, geomorphological features at the bridge site. The BA was submitted to the regulatory agencies in March 2004. In June 2004, ODOT received a joint Biological Opinion from NMFS and the USFWS addressing 73 threatened, endangered, proposed, and selected sensitive species and their designated or proposed critical habitat. In addition to listed fish, wildlife, and plants, the BA also satisfied the requirements of the MMPA, MBTA, FWCA, and MSA. ODOT expects that 85 to 90 percent of the bridges under the OTIA III Bridge Program will be permitted using the programmatic approach, resulting in significant time and cost savings. ODOT anticipates that the programmatic approach to environmental compliance will, program-wide, result in time and cost savings of two years and $54 million over the 10-year program, exclusive of time saved on the part of state and federal resource agencies. Bridge design using the environmental performance standards developed for the program is now underway.