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For cynics and pragmatists, a new tolled bridge over the Cape Fear River seems like a fait accompli.
With a price tag of over $1.1 billion, NCDOT can’t foot the whole bill — or, at least, can’t justify spending that much money here while other projects around the state languish. Even with a $242 million federal grant, officials say the only way to fund the bridge right now is with a toll.
It’s always been a deeply unpopular option, but now instead of a spectre on the horizon, it’s closer to becoming a concrete and steel reality.
And the toll isn’t the only issue. Wilmington City Council, along with environmental and historical preservation advocates, have voiced deep concerns, especially about one of the two final design options being considered by NCDOT — that’s Alternative B, a fixed-height bridge that is taller, longer, and will incur more negative impacts than Alternative A, a shorter bridge with a movable span.
While NCDOT won’t make a decision until after the public comment period (which is going on right now), many are afraid that transportation officials will lean towards Alternative B, which is slightly less expensive and won’t require ongoing maintenance on a movable section.
The city is pushing back and looking at new options to replace the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge (CFMB), but in very real ways, time is running out – in part because that federal grant has a ticking clock, requiring funding to be obligated to a project by the end of September next year, meaning a host of steps have to be completed before that.
Unless local officials can get NCDOT and its state and federal partners to change course, there’s not much they can do. There’s a nuclear option, rescinding earlier approvals of a toll project – but a new state law could put local counties and municipalities on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in planning costs that would have to be paid back. And derailing the project could mean losing that quarter-billion in federal funding for good.
After dragging along for five years, things are now moving much faster. Over the next five to six months, several pieces are slated to fall into place, including design selection and state authorization for the toll.
How do you end up with a toll bridge that the majority of residents seem to hate? As Hemingway had it, “Gradually. Then suddenly.”
The bridge is dead, long live the bridge
In 2019, the Cape Fear Cross (a.k.a. Cape Fear Skyway, or the ‘southern bridge’) was deauthorized. The proposed 9-mile-long, 225-foot-high toll bridge would have supplemented the CFMB, alleviating traffic congestion and giving freight traffic a more direct route to the port. (It's still technically a planned project, though unfunded, and with no identified location for a crossing.)
Not long after, NCDOT started considering options to replace the CFMB. The bridge is “functionally obsolete,” meaning it’s still safe, but increasingly expensive to maintain, and it can’t handle the ever-increasing amount of traffic in and out of Wilmington.
Pretty much from the start, a toll option was in the mix. In 2021, an ‘unsolicited’ toll option was put forward by a private company, although reliable sources at the time suggested the plan was coming out of then-Governor Roy Cooper’s office (which, as I recall, deferred our questions to NCDOT).
While NCDOT didn’t take a position on the proposal either way, they were clear it was unlikely they would have funding for the replacement bridge in the next decade. Coming off the disastrous legal repercussions of the Map Act, under which NCDOT unconstitutionally ‘froze’ development where it planned future roads without compensating landowners, the department had spiraled into a financial crisis. State and federal gas taxes, NCDOT's largest single funding stream, had not kept up with fuel efficiency. NCDOT wasn’t broke, exactly, but it wasn’t flush. State officials didn’t say it directly to the locals, but the message was clear: if you want a new bridge, you’re going to have to consider tolls.
Thus, while the WMPO shot down the unsolicited offer, the tolls wouldn’t go away.
By the end of 2023, NCDOT was being more direct about tolls for a replacement bridge. And, while state law prohibits tolling existing infrastructure, NCDOT argued at the time that a new bridge would have six lanes, instead of four, and a bike and pedestrian path — which, ok, kind of cool — making it new infrastructure.
In early 2024, local elected officials serving on the Wilmington Urban Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (WMPO) begrudgingly agreed to play a paradoxical game: by voting to “consider” a toll option, they hoped to ultimately stave off the need for tolling.
The logic went like this: a toll-funded bridge was a more financially viable project, which would attract state and possibly federal grants. Earn enough grants, and then the toll — originally the catalyst for success — would no longer be needed. It was a tough decision for WMPO members who voted in favor, and they took a considerable amount of flak.
But six months later, when the federal government offered a $242 million grant from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, it looked like their gamble had paid off. A bipartisan cadre of local, state, and federal officials gathered, undeterred by a July rainstorm, to celebrate. At the time, the grant funded roughly half the cost of the bridge, and local officials had high hopes that NCDOT could fund the rest — without a toll.
In the wonky but high-stakes world of transportation planning, these were happy times. They did not last.
A billion reasons to worry
During a March 2025 council meeting, Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo essentially blurted out that the cost of the CFMB replacement had skyrocketed to $1.1 billion.
“We’re talking about [a] billion–plus,” he said. “It’s not even a joke.”
NCDOT confirmed it shortly afterward: the estimated price tag had gone from around $245 million in 2020 to $400 million in 2023, then to $480 million in 2024, and now to over a billion dollars.
Inflation was a heavy driver, but so were more detailed plans, which showed increased costs for ‘bridging’ the wetlands on the Brunswick County side, along with eminent domain costs on the New Hanover County side.
With somewhere around $700 million now left to make up, some officials felt less comfortable with the toll gambit.
It was also starting to dawn on folks that the best option on the table at the time — Alternative C – wasn’t really an option at all. Alternative C was supposed to be a fixed-height bridge that was 100 feet tall, plus or minus 35 feet, based on input from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard.
To the optimists, it meant the possibility of a lower-cost, lower-impact 65-foot bridge, and a lot of people preferred it, most vocally, downtown historic preservation advocates. Wilmington City Councilwoman Salette Andrews drafted a resolution to support Alternative C — even though, as Saffo noted, it didn’t really seem to be a real possibility. Folks felt confused or gaslit.
Still, the city was told by NCDOT board member Landon Zimmer, who also sits on the WMPO board, to “trust the process,” suggesting the city cool its heels and avoid saber-rattling.
Two months later, in May 2025, the Army Corps weighed in, asking for the 135-foot clearance. While this was disappointing to many, it was likely a foregone conclusion. Numerous sources familiar with the project, but not authorized to weigh in on it, told me that the Corps doesn’t like to change navigation channels, the federally authorized specs for waterways that dictate how deep they can be dredged, and how wide and tall bridges must be.
If anything, the Corps would have preferred a taller bridge. Here’s why:
Back in 1996, the feds authorized a 38-foot-deep channel from the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge to the Hilton Railroad Bridge north of downtown. At the time, there was considerably more industrial activity upriver, including the Almont Shipping Company, which operated on the north side of Wilmington’s riverfront.
In a report supporting that channel, the feds used a hypothetical vessel that was 712 feet long, 106 feet wide, and up to 75,000 gross tons. There was no specific height, but officials noted a vessel that size would typically be between 120 and 147 feet tall.
Wilmington’s waterfront looked much different in 2025 (Almont had closed down 20 years earlier, and its property was redeveloped). There was very little industrial traffic north of the CFMB. But the Corps thought that the 1996 standards should apply to a new bridge.
In fact, an Army Corps spokesperson told me, “Ideally, the bridge should be constructed to a height of 147 feet or higher to accommodate the largest vessel for which the channel was designed.”
In the end, since the existing CFMB was 135 feet with its lift section raised, with no documented impairment of the channel, the Corps accepted the height.
The Army Corps is just one of a dozen members of what’s called the ‘Merger Team,’ a host of federal and state organizations that work with NCDOT and WMPO to design the bridge. In theory, they’re all partners with seats at the table, but in practice, the Corps is, as one former city staffer told me, “the 900-lb gorilla in the room.” Notably, the Corps isn't a funding partner — they don't pony up money if their requirements increase a project's cost (which someone once described to me as someone picking toppings on a pizza they weren't chipping in for, an analogy NCDOT essentially agreed with). An NCDOT engineer told me they had discussions with the Corps and other federal partners about its requirements, but those apparently didn’t come to much.
And that meant the remaining alternatives would both run over a billion dollars — which meant, again and more likely than ever, a toll.
In May 2025, WMPO passed resolutions that both continued to support consideration of a toll while reserving the right to withdraw approval of a toll until NCDOT actually advertised for a contract to build the replacement bridge. Two months later in July, the NCDOT officially adopted the replacement as a tolled project — importantly, that is contingent on approval from the General Assembly. And in October, the WMPO added a tolled replacement to its “Cape Fear Navigating Change 2050” — its 25-year planning document.
The local officials on the WMPO continued to hate the idea of a toll, but the strategy was still to support it while working – or hoping, even praying – to find enough additional funding to make a toll unnecessary.
The game remained the same, but it looked increasingly quixotic.
Then suddenly...
Jump forward to this summer and, after six years, things were starting to accelerate.
In July, NCDOT shut down another private offer without offering it to WMPO for consideration. The offer may have been flawed, but some saw it as confirmation that NCDOT was homing in on its final plan, a state-built and managed toll bridge.
In August, NCDOT published its Environmental Assessment (EA), a 66-page document (not including lengthy appendices) detailing the expected impacts of alternatives A and B. Despite the name, the assessment is based on the physical ‘environment,’ meaning the proximity to the bridge, more than solely an examination of environmental concerns, though those are included.
The EA kicked off a public comment period, which runs through mid-October. After NCDOT and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) review all the comments, the feds will either issue a ‘Finding of No Significant Impact’ or produce a more detailed Environmental Impact Statement. That decision is slated for late February, according to a timeline produced by city staff.
The EA also sparked new concerns, separate from the toll. A major issue is Alternative B’s larger footprint, which will disrupt more natural habitats and require the destruction of more private property to make way for on- and off-ramps. Perhaps most concerning for city council is that Alternative B drops traffic off on South Fifth Avenue, in a residential area that’s not built for high-density traffic. The EA shows Fifth Avenue as having four lanes — but the city recently completed a multi-million-dollar project to convert it to two lanes and add bike lanes.
Wilmington City Council unanimously passed a resolution, again stating its opposition to a toll, both because it would impact the city’s lowest-income residents and workers disproportionately, and because it would redirect traffic over the untolled Isabel Holmes Bridge into Wilmington’s Northside. We got a taste of the latter in 2024 when repairs closed all inbound, and then all outbound, traffic on the CFMB for several months. The resulting traffic disruptions were, as a city staffer told me at the time, “a shitshow for the history books.”
The city also strongly opposed Alternative B. And the resolution asked for more direct involvement with the Merger Team. Right now, the city is represented through WMPO, where it has two of the 13 seats. But council members stressed that Wilmington will be impacted by the bridge design decision in far more significant ways than, say, Belville or Wrightsville Beach, or Pender County.
Perhaps most interestingly, council directed staff to start exploring an alternative to the alternatives — a new option that could meet the requirements of a new bridge with less impact than two designs being considered by NCDOT right now.
Council was clear: they understood the need for and supported a new bridge. But they felt pressured to accept options — even the lesser of two evils, the smaller Alternative A lift bridge — that could hurt the city culturally and economically for generations. They aim to get a new option on the table by the end of the public comment period to avoid disruptions, to add to the process instead of rerailing it.
“I'm not trying to kill the bridge project. I'm trying to advocate for a bridge project that doesn't kill Wilmington,” Councilwoman Cassidy Santaguida told me in an interview, along with Councilman David Joyner, for this week’s episode of The Newsroom.
I asked Santaguida and Joyner if they felt this was a little late in the game to be throwing new ideas into the mix. Joyner said that, earlier in the process, council members, especially those not on WMPO, wouldn’t likely get a meaningful audience with the Merger Team.
He also noted that, in the past, the city was told to avoid being “alarmist” and weighing in while the process was still in its earlier stages.
“So now that we are quite far in the process, they want to flip their argument and tell us to be quiet yet again. So we're just not going to do that this time. This is the one where it's now or never. We're going to weigh in. We're going to make our voices heard,” he said.
City council members are imploring residents to participate in the public comment period for the project, and the city recently launched an expansive website, stating its position and laying out how it sees the potential negative impacts for residents. It’s a clear indication of just how strongly city leaders feel about the issue.
Gorilla wrestling and other options
So, what can council actually do? What levers could they pull to change the course of the bridge project?
My first question: is there time to alter the project?
The main driver of the current timeline is the $242 million federal grant. In order to avoid losing the grant, the funding for the project has to be committed by the end of September 2027. If not, the grant funds simply expire.
The replacement project doesn’t have to be shovel-ready, but the funds have to be obligated. Based on that, NCDOT plans to pick a ‘preferred alternative’ in late October or early November. WMPO’s last chance to rescind its approval of a toll would be in February – but NCDOT and WMPO both say no additional action is needed from them to approve a toll. Shortly after that, legislators would vote on authorizing the toll.
No one has flat-out said it would be impossible to get an extension on the grant, but it seems implausible.
In an email to Wilmington City Council and top staff, Director of Legislative & Intergovernmental Affairs Kara Spencer wrote, “There is not precedent for an extension and any effort to achieve one is unlikely to succeed given the current economic/political climate.”
According to Spencer, reapplying may not be an option — although it’s unclear right now.
“Because the legislative window for the [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] concludes at the end of fiscal year 2026, the program faces ‘reauthorization uncertainty,’” she wrote.
And while, in theory, the project could move ahead without the $242 million grant, it seems like a serious political liability to be responsible for flushing a quarter-billion dollars down the toilet. Local officials have been pilloried for much, much less.
That in mind, the grant timeline obviously constrains how the project could pivot.
One suggestion, raised by several council members, including Salette Andrews, who has written extensively about it on her public policy blog, is to look at the navigation channel requirements from the Army Corps of Engineers.
Officials from the Corps and NCDOT have both told me this could, quite literally, take an “act of Congress.” There doesn’t seem to be a mechanism by which the Corps would reconsider the channel on its own. But, at the same time, the Corps can and does revisit and review projects all the time. It’s not out of the question, but it’s also not as simple as crossing out “135 feet” and writing, say, “90 feet” in a document and emailing it to NCDOT.
In a lengthy post, Brayton Willis, a retired senior project manager for the Corps who now lives in Leland, laid out the complex process of revisiting a navigation channel.
“Such a decision deserves far more than a simple legislative amendment or a reaction to current navigation patterns. It would require comprehensive engineering, navigation, environmental, and economic analyses, together with consultation among federal and state agencies, the maritime industry, local governments, and the public. It would also require careful consideration of the long-term interests of the Port of Wilmington, regional transportation, interstate commerce, military readiness, and public safety,” he wrote.
[Note: After this newsletter was sent out, Willis wrote me to tell me the actual mechanism would be asking Congressman David Rouzer and senators Ted Budd and Thom Tillis to "request that the Secretary of the Army, acting through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, initiate an expedited review under Section 216 of the Flood Control Act of 1970, 33 U.S.C. § 549a, of the Wilmington Harbor federal navigation project upstream of the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge," and the $242-million grant window be held open until that review was complete. Willis said this will be part of his public comment to NCDOT.]
The arguments that Wilmington’s waterfront looks nothing like the industrial scene of the late 1990s make a lot of sense. And if there are still businesses and land uses that require the current navigation channel, there are probably some interesting ways local government could address that — for one, buying those properties out.
I think it’s important to note that the Army Corps aren’t the bad guys. They’re engineers, who essentially work like contractors for governments that want to undertake big projects. NC Ports wants to dredge the river? The Corps tells them what that would look like. NCDOT wants to build a new bridge? The Corps tells them what that would look like. They don’t have ideological positions on things; by and large, they just, well, engineer things. All that to say, the Army Corps could plausibly reconsider, and reconfigure, the channel. But could any of that happen in the next five months?
Leaving aside the bridge design, other suggestions have looked at avoiding tolls, including funding the bridge with a sales tax.
In September of last year, WMPO members, including New Hanover County Commissioner Dane Scalise and then-Wilmington City Councilman Luke Waddell, explored a tri-county transportation sales tax. It’s not quite a Hail Mary, but it would be complicated. First, officials would try to get public feedback on the tax, then all three counties would pass resolutions, asking for state permission to move forward. With the green light from the General Assembly, they could set up a regional authority, which would craft ballot language, and then the sales tax would go to a vote.
I think it’s worth noting that, as unpopular as a toll would be, a sales tax would not be a slam dunk. It would help spread the cost around to tourists, which is a plus. But selling folks in Pender County, who aren’t much impacted by the bridge, would require sweetening the deal with other projects. It's doable, but it would take a thoughtful approach. And, some people just hate taxes. Given the choice to vote, they might simply say, 'no.'
One problem: the next opportunity for the sales tax to appear on a ballot would be in November 2027, according to city staff. That’s after the grant deadline. NCDOT and WMPO say they’re continuing to work on a funding solution — but it’s not clear what role the sales tax could play.
Here’s an open question: Could we get creative, and move ahead with a tolled project, which would take years to build, and then — if we can clear all the hurdles to implement a sales tax — change the funding mechanism?
A clawback concern
There’s one more wrinkle here, and that’s the new language in the state budget that essentially puts regional transportation organizations — like WMPO — on the hook for preliminary costs of a project if they unilaterally cancel it or change the funding mechanism.
The provision was included by Republican lawmakers to pressure Charlotte and surrounding towns to accept tolls on Interstate 77. Under the updated statute, local governments would be on the hook for almost $70 million in costs for planning, engineering, and studies. And, if that wasn’t repaid, NCDOT would withhold support for future projects.
The question is, would that same law apply if the WMPO withdrew its support for the Cape Fear replacement as a tolled bridge?
I want to be clear here: I haven’t heard from any local officials, in Wilmington or other governments represented by the WMPO, that they plan to derail the bridge project.
The law only applies if the decision to cancel a project or, in this case, rescind support for tolling, is unilateral – meaning done without NCDOT’s involvement. The law would not apply if NCDOT and the Merger Team came to a new agreement, for example, to use a regional sales tax, or to pursue some other option.
But, hypothetically, if WMPO did vote to rescind its support for a toll, it seems like NCDOT would be legally owed for planning costs, which, as I understand it, top $30 million dollars at least. And that money would be owed, not by WMPO, but by the counties and municipalities whose representatives on the planning organization voted to kill the toll. So, if Wilmington’s two representatives voted no on a toll, that’s two out of 13, or about 15% of the bill — probably around $5 million.
(What happens if the two members voted differently? I have no idea. But, in any case, you get why this would be a concern.)
WMPO said they have actually asked NCDOT if the law would apply to them twice, but as of last week, hadn’t received a clear answer. Some sources at NCDOT have told me, off the record, they believe it would. I reached out to NCDOT officially; a spokesperson told me they didn’t want to “speculate on a hypothetical.”
Blow the bridge
So, what happens next?
Again, for cynics and pragmatists, the answer is, ‘the thing that was always going to happen.’ NCDOT will build the best bridge it can for the money, and drivers will pay the lion’s share in tolls: $700 million dollars, two bucks (or more) at a time.
I suspect some at NCDOT resent the David and Goliath framing of Wilmington versus the powers that be. And that’s not exactly what’s going on here. I think you can understand Wilmington’s very real frustration, having been patient and trusting, only to end up with options that are, at best, disappointing. You can also understand that NCDOT has a particularly poor hand to play.
No one, including NCDOT folks I’ve spoken with off the record, loves the idea of tolls. But, as I understand it, this is just the cost of progress, from NCDOT’s point of view. Lots of places deal with tolls. NCDOT’s financial situation is not wholly different from what it was five years ago. The region needs, most would say deserves, a new bridge. This is NCDOT’s best, and maybe only, way of paying for it – it always has been.
Based on public comment, that bridge could be Alternative A — the less bad option, as the city sees it. (You can find more info on public comment here, including the public hearings this week, and how to submit comments by phone and email.)
But it could also be Alternative B, which, from an engineering and financial perspective, could be seen as the better choice: a simpler design without a movable section means less cost. That’s the argument from the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce, whose president and CEO Natalie English wrote, “provides the best long-term solution for moving people and goods across the Cape Fear River while preserving the river’s role in our economy,” in an opinion piece published in the Greater Wilmington Business Journal at the end of August. English also argued that Alternative B would be less prone to traffic disruptions due to a moving lift section, which could require closing the bridge due to malfunction or maintenance.
More optimistically, maybe NCDOT and the Merger Team can figure out an alternative funding method or a more creative hybrid funding approach. And, perhaps the city will deliver a third option that checks all the boxes for the members of the Merger Team. City council said repeatedly that they feel like this decision is too important, too consequential for this and future generations, for them to blow it.
Again, no one has suggested the nuclear option out loud, at least not within earshot of me. But what happens if WMPO does blow things up, rescinds its toll approval, and sets off a chain reaction that ends with an unfunded replacement project?
According to a WMPO spokesperson, “if there is insufficient funding to deliver a replacement bridge, NCDOT would develop a rehabilitation project for the existing bridge.”
And that, after all this, would leave us back at the beginning.
