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After Clackamas County voters rejected their contribution to the Sellwood Bridge project in last week’s election, the project became a great, big question mark. Can the bridge be built without $22 million of its expected budget? That’s a question we expected Multnomah County to address at its board briefing this morning on the Sellwood Bridge. Not anymore, though鈥�.

鈥淭he County Chair Jeff Cogen conferred with other board members and decided it was best to postpone today’s board briefing on the Sellwood Bridge project until staff had some time to work on some of the options to close our funding shortfall,鈥� said Multnomah County spokesman Mike Pullen. 鈥淥bviously the interest among the board and the public is what do we do now after the Clackamas County vote, there’s other things about the project we could have talked about today, but the chair thought it was best to focus on the funding shortfall.鈥�

Here are some of those options staff will be looking into for the next few weeks, according to Pullen:

• Seeking (more) assistance from funding partners at state, federal, and regional level.
• Shifting funds for future Multnomah County bridge projects, such as painting on the Broadway Bridge, which is otherwise scheduled to happen in a couple years.
• Examining the possibility of postponing part of the project. An example would be building the bridge, but putting off the part of the project to redesign and reconstruct the interchange where the bridge meets Oregon Route 43.
• Looking to shrink the project’s price tag: The selected construction team for the project, Slayden Construction Group and Sundt Construction, has been asked to create its own cost estimate, independent of the estimate produced by the project’s engineering firm. The county hopes that the construction team, which works closer with the materials and labor costs, might find some savings others have missed.

There’s no date scheduled for the next Sellwood Bridge briefing, Pullen said, but he projected it would happen sometime in June. He said the postponed meeting shouldn’t be taken as a sign of a postponed Sellwood Bridge.

“We’re not saying that we have a project delay yet, but a project delay is a possibility,” he said.

The Sellwood Bridge project is expected to cost $290 million. Prior to the Clackamas County vote, the project had a $20 million shortfall. After Clackamas County voters rejected a $5-a-year registration fee that would have provided $22 million for the project, its shortfall is now $42 million. Read more about the project’s funding and the Clackamas County vote here.