“You could make a movie out of this.”
That’s what the director of public works and development for the City of Benwood – David McLaughlin – thinks of the ongoing debacle involving the still-standing Bellaire Toll Bridge, a span closed more than 30 years ago that is losing bits and pieces of debris to the Ohio River and the streets below it.
“It was all a scam.”
That’s how McLaughlin, the Republican candidate for the Marshall County Commission, sums up the situation when explaining the bridge’s current ownership, the TV show demo deal with KDC Investment and owner Lee Chaklos, and how the federal government came to be its kinda-current (pronounced “absent”) caretaker.
And now that it’s been more than a year since, according to McLaughlin, the state of West Virginia disengaged on a deal to demolish the Bellaire Toll Bridge and allow Benwood to benefit from scrap sales to rehabilitate the span’s 850-foot approach on the Mountain State side, McLaughlin now is asking one simple question.
“Does someone have to die?”
“For years, we’ve been trying to get answers and find a solution because this is a major public safety concern in our city,” he insisted. “We’re the smallest entity involved here and all we get told is that it’s up to us. It’s on us.
“Well, folks, we don’t have that kind of money in Benwood, West Virginia,” McLaughlin pronounced. “We can’t borrow it either, and we shouldn’t have to … especially since the State said it would.”
The Bellaire Toll Bridge is a cantilever truss-designed span that opened in 1926 to establish another connection between the Northern Panhandle and East Ohio. The construction cost was about $1.2 million – the equivalent of nearly $26 million today – and seven million tons of structural steel was installed during construction.
The bridge opened to the public on Dec. 22, 1926, and media outlets at the time reported at least 7,000 vehicles paid the toll and crossed the span that first day. The surface infrastructure for the bridge remains in place in Benwood, but the access ramps in Bellaire were removed during the construction of the four-lane Ohio Route 7 bypass built in the late 1990s.
“It was a really popular way for a lot of people to cross the river, and the state of West Virginia must have thought so, too, because of the construction they did for it when building the new (W. Va. Route 2) through there,” McLaughlin explained. “But now West Virginia doesn’t seem too interested in the bridge, and that’s because it’s time to take care of what needs taken care of.
“There are liens on the bridge, and the federal courts have the bridge in limbo,” he said. “Meanwhile, the bridge sits over top the city of Benwood, and it sits above where people walk and drive. There are city buses and school buses, and rocks have fallen from the concrete parts of the thing, and there have been chunks of metal that have fallen at the one-and-only entrance to the industrial park. If something happens to the bridge, we have a big situation.”
Danger From Above
Reporters with The Intelligencer in Wheeling penned a series of articles on the history and current status of the 98-year-old span, and the publication’s editors concluded in a March 30th editorial, “The Bellaire Bridge still stands, rusting and unused, a conservatory to wayward trees and shrubs — a testament to bureaucratic nonsense of the highest order.”
Those reports, however, did not reveal the “done deal” – at least that’s what McLaughlin and Police Chief Frank Longwell thought in February 2023 – between the State of West Virginia and the City of Bellaire to finally raze the orphaned span.
“We met with Charlie Reynolds when he was the state delegate representing (House District 6) this area at the time, and we reached out to our (federal) senators (Joe) Manchin and (Shelley Moore) Capito, and to everyone and anyone who would listen to us about the problem the Bellaire Bridge is to our city,” McLaughlin insisted. “Charlie Reynold got us the most action, and he told us to go get a number, an estimate, for taking the bridge down, so that’s what we did.
“After working with experts in the business, we got an estimate of $3 million, and part of that deal was that we would get the proceeds from the scrap,” he said. “Charlie then told us that the Governor’s Office was on board, and I thought we had figured out how to take care of this problem. The money was supposed to be in the Governor’s contingency fund, but then we met with the officials with the Department of Transportation, and they had a completely different number for the demolition.”
That number, by the way, was $10 million.
“I remember me and Frank (Longwell) looking at each other and immediately asking where that number came from. They said they did a study on the bridge, but they never came to us to ask for the key to the lock on the gate. What kind of an inspection could it have been?” McLaughlin asked. “To this day, I have no idea what that was all about and how they came up with a number three times more than what our number was. It makes no sense.
“It’s $3 million. At least it was when we had real experts work on the estimate. It’s not $10 million, but if they keep waiting and waiting, it will be in the future,” he said. “When they insisted back then, we knew it wasn’t coming down anytime soon. And now, we can’t get the audience, and we haven’t said much about it until now because we thought we could get the state involved again.”
Reynolds, now the district manager for the state’s Division of Highways District 6 office in Moundsville, forwarded all questions to the state agency’s office in Charleston. Officials from that office have yet to return messages.
“Charlie got us the audience and that’s what we needed,” McLaughlin said. “What happened after that was all Charleston you-know-what, and that doesn’t work for us. So, does someone need to die?”
