Stimulus-funded bridge in Bothell a boon or boondoggle?

President Obama's stimulus plan has delivered a new bridge just outside Seattle — not to South Park, but over North Creek.

Employees on their lunch break are watching salmon spawn this week below the wooden, arch-truss span, built for $260,000. It's the newest piece of a three-mile Bothell city trail, which reaches a huge employment cluster and college campus.

But some passers-by are baffled, including Tom Tangen, who worked nearby earlier this year. A sidewalk already exists 20 paces away to cross the stream, along Northeast 195th Street near I-405.

"It's kind of embarrassing to have a bridge like this, that's not needed," he says.

An overlooked reality about stimulus money is how liberally it is spread around. A total $6.4 billion has been awarded to Washington state, to help pay for everything from Hanford cleanup to teacher hires.

Highways are getting $492 million and transit $179 million. Locally, the Puget Sound Regional Council, has allocated $78 million to 46 projects.

The council distributed $2.4 million of highway stimulus aid to nonmotorized uses, of which the Bothell trail got $1.1 million. "It's a policy set by Congress," said council spokesman Rick Olson. "In our experience, these things are high-value projects. People generally love the trails and pedestrian improvements where they live."

Bothell's project was fully designed by early 2009, meeting the federal requirement to be "shovel ready," said city spokeswoman Joy Johnston.

Huge buildings, parking lots and roads conceal the creek for miles, a flaw the city is changing through evolving parks and paths. Trail users this week paused to watch red salmon scour gravel nests in a foot or two of water.

"Anything to encourage people to walk and ride bikes," said Dean Coates, watching the spectacle at midday Monday. "I'll definitely walk down here more often than I ever did before."

"To me, this wasn't the best place," said Len Baquian, walking his dachshund across the timber deck, as he glanced at the nearby sidewalk. But he also plans to bring his family there to enjoy nature.

The new bridge is safer and roomier, at 12 feet wide, than the 5-foot sidewalk along the busy street, Johnston said. It's not only for recreation. A few students from the UW-Bothell campus crossed by, while Alex Gibson said she walked the new bridge to work, after getting off at her I-405 bus stop. The new trail eventually will connect with the Sammamish River Trail downtown.

Baquian sees yet another function — to provide Bothell another landmark. The wood arch resembles the old footbridge at Bothell Landing, which appears in the new city logo. "We are a city of rivers," says Johnston.

Meanwhile, the South Park Bridge, for industrial traffic and a low-income neighborhood, missed the cut and closed in June, forcing 20,000 vehicles a day to detour. It wasn't deemed shovel-ready in early 2009.

As money was being spread thinly across the country, officials including Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., created another round of stimulus called "TIGER," for big-time projects that got missed. South Park lost again, while Seattle's Mercer Street rebuild and a Spokane freeway expansion won.

Bill Pease, president of the South Park Bridge Group, said losing to Mercer Street, and a Redmond overpass at Microsoft, was harder to take, compared with small projects where federal dollars are divided into many pots. That's how the system works, he said.

"It would be hard to compare ourselves to a pedestrian bridge in Bothell."

Any day now, South Park backers will learn if they've won $36 million in "TIGER II," after federal Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood stopped for a look Sept. 8.

Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com