South Florida Sun Sentinel
Hodgkins says he knew right away that plan wouldn’t work, but he kept quiet.
Then he noticed headlines about Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis and his fierce opposition to Broward County’s plan to build a bridge for commuter rail through downtown Fort Lauderdale . Trantalis keeps on insisting a tunnel is the best way to get commuter trains across the New River , even if it costs more.
Hodgkins happens to agree.
But this time, he didn’t stay quiet.
He put in a call to the mayor’s office and invited him down to take a closer look at the Port of Miami Tunnel , an award-winning masterpiece designed to last for 150 years.
Trantalis accepted, then extended an invite to the county.
On March 1 , Trantalis and County Commissioner Lamar Fisher joined Hodgkins for a tour of the Port of Miami tunnel, with the city manager and assistant county administrator in tow.
Four days later, at the mayor’s request, Hodgkins appeared before the entire Fort Lauderdale commission, taking aim at naysayers who claim a tunnel can’t be done.
Hodgkins started with a slide show, eventually pulling up a still photo of the tunnel maker’s secret weapon.
“This is our girl here,” he said with a hint of admiration. “This is Harriet, our tunnel boring machine. Forty-two feet in diameter and three football fields long.”
Before the tunnel was built, all the trucks going to the Port of Miami would exit Interstate 95 and travel through five traffic lights downtown.
“They’d come right through downtown and spew their diesel,” he told commissioners. “Our tunnel took 80% of the big cargo trucks out of downtown.”
Another secret weapon
Hodgkins also shot down flooding fears, saying the Port of Miami Tunnel has another secret weapon: 55-ton metal floodgates that keep the water out.
“I heard one county commissioner say, ‘A tunnel doesn’t make sense because we’re right at sea level here, and a tunnel will flood,’” Hodgkins said. “Well, we have floodgates. The safest place to be during a hurricane is probably inside a tunnel. Our floodgates take 20 minutes to come down (when a hurricane is heading this way). They seal the tunnel watertight.”
The twin tunnels, both 42 feet in diameter and some 120 feet below sea level, opened nearly a decade ago in August 2014 , connecting the mainland to the port.
At the time, Hogkins was CEO of Miami Access Tunnel . In June, he appointed another CEO and took on the role of chairman of the board.
It cost taxpayers $643 million to build Miami’s twin tunnels, Hodgkins told commissioners, with the total cost coming in at $1.1 billion , taking into account financing and maintenance costs over 30 years. The state contributed $650 million , Miami-Dade County contributed $402 million and the city of Miami $50 million .
Trantalis shared news of his tunnel tour in a social media post the day after the tour.
“The executives at MAT Concessionaire invited us to come see the tunnel, which they built and now operate under a public-private partnership they created with the Florida Department of Transportation ,” he wrote.
“We learned how it is indeed possible to build a tunnel through South Florida’s unique geology and that issues of resiliency can be addressed through the construction of floodgates and pumps,” the mayor’s post said. “The success of the Miami Tunnel shows that we can undertake a tunnel under the New River to service the planned commuter rail project and do not have to build a bridge.”
During the tour of the Miami tunnel, Fisher said he urged Hodgkins to send the county an unsolicited proposal for a train tunnel under the New River .
“We would be getting information firsthand from someone who has built a tunnel,” Fisher told the South Florida Sun Sentinel . “That would give us a true cost. That would give us a foundation to make an intelligent decision on.”
‘We don’t know what’s down there’
The tunnels are different but also share similarities, Fisher said, including the unknown.
“Hodgkins told us they ran into issues with voids they had to fill with grout,” Fisher said. “And they had to go through stone that broke the boring machine. That’s what everyone is saying, we just don’t know what’s down there that we’d have to bore through.”
On Tuesday, Hodgkins told the Fort Lauderdale commission that Fisher had asked him if his company could build a tunnel here.
“We would love to be digging in our backyard,” Hodgkins told the commission. “We would be glad to take a look at this.”
In the meantime, county commissioners have agreed to spend $2 million to hire an engineering firm to do preliminary design work for a bridge.
“I wanted some dollars set aside to study the (the city’s tunnel research),” Fisher said. “We want to make sure we look at all avenues at the end of the day.”
On Tuesday, the Fort Lauderdale commission got more details from the consulting firm BDO about what a tunnel might cost.
According to BDO’s current estimates, a 1.1-mile twin-bore train tunnel would cost $888 million .
BDO officials also explored what impacts a twin tunnel might have on surrounding properties. But even two underground tunnels will not require the seizing of private property like an above ground bridge will, they told commissioners.
A question of cost
BDO requested copies of the proposed bridge design from the county, but none currently exist.
Without the bridge design, BDO has no way to determine the cost of land acquisition for a bridge or the impact on private property both during construction and long-term.
The Miami tunnel was built in four years and three months. The design period alone took three years and three months.
Building a train tunnel in Fort Lauderdale would likely take a decade, Greg Stuart , executive director of the Broward Metropolitan Planning Organization , told the Sun Sentinel .
It would take around five years to complete the required environmental reports, Stuart said. Design would take another two years. And construction would likely take up to three years.
“Then you have to inflate the cost to the year of expenditures,” he said. “And we’re back to over $1 billion .”
If the Miami tunnel were built today, it would likely cost $2.5 billion , Stuart said.
When asked by the Sun Sentinel , Hodgins declined to say what he thinks a train tunnel might cost. But he does think it can be done.
“Those who don’t want it can find every way for it not to work,” he said. “And that’s why it took 30 years for Miami to do it. It won’t happen overnight.”
Susannah Bryan can be reached at sbryan@sunsentinel.com . Follow me @Susannah_Bryan
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