PORT CLINTON — Merchants along State Rt. 163 west of the Portage River drawbridge would like to know when the river crossing will finally reopen to traffic.

What they don’t want, however, is another missed target.

“Business is down all the way across the board because of this,” Matt Paeth, who with his brother Mark co-owns Drawbridge Marina and Shore-Nuf Charters, said Tuesday.

Mr. Paeth’s comments came after the Ohio Department of Transportation announced the replacement bridge will not reopen in time for the Independence Day holiday — the project’s third official postponement so far.

ODOT officials said they’re sympathetic to the situation, but drawbridges are complicated mechanical systems that don’t progress from paper to product as reliably as fixed-span bridges do.

And well aware of frustration with the bridge’s delay, project manager Kyle Ruedel balked Tuesday morning at offering a new date beyond estimating that Route 163 traffic might resume “two to 2½ weeks” after the Fourth of July.

“We’re going to open it as soon as we’re able to,” Mr. Ruedel vowed.

Later Tuesday, ODOT announced a new target date of July 20.

The challenge, the project engineer said, is that the gear assemblies that mechanically raise and lower the bridge’s two draw spans must fit within thousandths of an inch and align those spans perfectly together and with the bridge’s abutments.

That sort of tolerance isn’t produced in a fabrication shop, but by making onsite adjustments, Mr. Ruedel said.

Every time something in one of the bridge’s four corners is tweaked, that affects the other corners, he said, and if something has to be sent back to a shop for modification or a new part has to be made, that takes time.

“It’s a moving structure,” Mr. Ruedel said. “As much as we’d like to believe we can take it from paper [plans] and put it right in the field, it’s not that simple.”

But at Wozniak Sunoco on Route 163 about a mile west of the bridge, the repeated postponements were taken Tuesday as evidence of incompetence.

“It sounds like they don’t know what the hell they were doing when they started,’ proprietor Alfred Wozniak said. “We’re thinking, make it a year, it’ll sound better,” he added with sarcastic bitterness.

One of just four drawbridges maintained by ODOT, the Portage River structure was built in the 1930s. Mr. Ruedel said everything except for its concrete supports and approaches has been replaced during the ongoing, $12.9 million project undertaken by a joint venture of the Ruhlin Co. of Sharon Center, Ohio, and Perram Electric, Inc., of Wadsworth, Ohio.

The entire project was already a year late when it started in October because of initial problems with the replacement spans’ fabrication and the need to confine the river’s vessel-traffic closing to the winter months.

The river reopened to boats on schedule in early spring, but the initial May 25 target for restoring vehicular traffic fell by the wayside in late April, and just before Memorial Day, ODOT also gave up on the new June 14 goal.

Mr. Paeth said the spring season was the hardest on his charter fishing business, because unlike the summertime peak, springtime activity depends on casual customers who might decide, based on a given day’s nice weather, to go out on the water.

There were many days where “we have no people over here, and the boats across the river are full,” he said.

The bridge being closed to vehicles also makes running marina errands a chore, along with lengthening Mr. Paeth’s daily commute from two minutes to 12.

“I hope when they [the contractor] get fined, the money goes to the businesses, not to the state,” Mr. Paeth said.

Rebecca Dangelo, ODOT’s district spokesman in Bowling Green, said that while the bridge contract does include a penalty clause for not reopening to traffic, “it doesn’t work that way” as far as using the fines as compensation.

Ms. Dangelo said the penalty will be subtracted from the value of the contract, though the exact penalty amount was not available Tuesday afternoon.

Contact David Patch at: dpatch@theblade.com or 419-724-6094.

First Published June 20, 2018, 11:00 a.m.