Photo by EMMA DELK The pavement on the deck of the former Bellaire Bridge is folded, having shifted over the 32 years since it closed. Weeds and small trees have found cracks that allow them to grow high above the Ohio River.

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of articles examining the status of the Bellaire Bridge, which formerly operated as a toll bridge spanning the Ohio River between Bellaire and Benwood. The bridge has been closed for 32 years with no viable plan in place for its removal.

BENWOOD — After serving residents on both sides of the Ohio River for 69 years as a toll bridge, the Bellaire Bridge is now an unusable structure that no one wants to claim.

Marshall County Assessor Eric Buzzard confirmed that the current deed for the bridge lists its ownership under KDC Investments. The company’s owner, Lee Chaklos, declined to comment on the company’s ownership of the bridge.

The last record of Chaklos’ involvement with the bridge was 10 years ago in U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio. Judge Algenon Marbley charged Chaklos with criminal corruption for lying about bridge investors, for which he served a 30-day jail sentence and paid a $2,500 fine.

Benwood Police Chief Frank Longwell has an interest in the bridge, as a portion of the span stretches over part of his city and has created hazards there in the past. Longwell described Chaklos’s sentence as “light” for someone who “went across the country defrauding people out of two billion (dollars) in investments to take the bridge down.”

Beyond the bridge’s current tie-up in the court system with KDC Investments, the structure has a troubled history of owners reneging on their promise to destroy it.

Initially constructed and owned by the Interstate Bridge Company, the Bellaire Bridge began operating as a toll bridge in September 1922.

The privately owned bridge was closed to all traffic in 1991 when the Bellaire side of the bridge was sold to the Ohio Department of Transportation to make way for construction of Ohio 7. The bridge ramp on the Ohio side of the river was demolished to accommodate highway construction, which rendered the bridge unusable.

The IBC then sold its interest in the bridge to Bellaire resident Roger Barack, who was ordered by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1998 to devise a demolition plan for the structure. Failing to comply with this order and others issued in 2001 and 2005 to remove the bridge, Barack launched a lawsuit against multiple defendants seeking to “adjudicate responsibility for the bridge.”

The suit traveled through the court system until it reached the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2008.

In May 2010, Barack sold the bridge for $1 to Advanced Explosives Demolition (AED), who then sold the bridge to KDC Investments for $25,000 a month later.

After this series of ownership transfers, KDC Investments filed a motion to “intervene or be substituted as a part” in the case and was granted ownership of the bridge in court.

A motion by KDC Investments to extend the deadline for its destruction until November 2012 was also granted by the court.

KDC Investments failed to meet this deadline since it could not post an appropriate bond to the city of Benwood for the demolition. Chaklos would have to pay a $1,000 daily fine in federal court if he did not begin demolition by June 20, 2013.

The company’s inability to follow through on destroying the bridge came to a head in February 2013.

KDC was held in contempt of court for “failing to take the steps to apply for a bond and ordered fines and additional status reports.”

Despite the legal action taken against it, KDC still made little progress in obtaining funds to raze the bridge. This lack of movement toward demolishing the span led to Chaklos being held in criminal contempt of court in September 2013.

Progress toward the bridge’s demise began again in 2017 when the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio appointed Columbus attorney David Kopech as a master to “promote resolution and removal of the bridge.”

This appointment resulted in five status conferences being held from February 2018 to February 2019 between Kopech and counsel for the Norfolk Southern Railway Company. Chaklos was not in attendance at the first status conference, the only one on record.

Over the course of these meetings, no resolution was reached regarding the bridge, meaning no action was taken in the case for over a year.

Norfolk Southern Railway Company would not comment on its participation in these status meetings or its legal involvement with the bridge.

In 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio again ordered KDC Investments to demolish the bridge.

“The case has been in the dismissal phase since 2007,” the court notes in its order. “We have done all we can to resolve this matter.”

Estimating that it has been “probably five or six years” since he was last in contact with Chaklos, Longwell believes that Chaklos followed in the footsteps of the owners before him — “grabbing their cash and running.”

The city of Benwood could legally seize the bridge, according to Longwell, but it does not have the funds, engineers or employees available to demolish the bridge.

“Right now, we’re just kind of in limbo with our fingers crossed that nobody gets injured or killed under it,” Longwell said, referring to debris falling from the deteriorating bridge in the past.

Despite KDC’s legal troubles, Marshall County and West Virginia officials still point to the company as the owner.

Describing the bridge’s ownership as “currently at a standstill,” Buzzard explained that no delinquent taxes are owed on the bridge since its ownership is “held up in the court system.”

“The bridge was still under tax-exempt status until a private company purchased it,” Buzzard noted. “Then it becomes personal property because it’s no longer in use as a toll bridge.”

Russell Rollyson, senior deputy state auditor at the West Virginia State Auditor’s Office, confirmed the state is not currently taxing the bridge. He said the state has not collected taxes on the structure since it operated as a toll bridge under public utility taxes.

No delinquent real estate taxes are being collected on the bridge by the West Virginia State Auditor’s Office, according to Rollyson, due to the bridge’s ownership status being tied up in the court system.

The West Virginia Division of Highways also has no ownership claim on the bridge. WVDOH State Bridge Engineer Tracy Brown said the WVDOH “does not own the Bellaire Bridge and has never owned it.”

“The state’s only involvement in the bridge was to estimate the cost of dismantling it,” Brown added.

A July 2022 WVDOH study determined that the cost for the removal of the entire bridge was approximately $11 million. To remove only the approach spans or the “land portion” of the bridge on the Benwood side would be approximately $3.5 million.

Due to the legal limbo the bridge is in, Longwell believes the state and federal governments “ought to kick in and help get it out of there.”

“It’s very unfortunate because I get what the state means regarding the private ownership of the bridge,” Longwell said. “But on the other hand, you have industry down there, supporting the state tax base.

“We have lots of employees and billions of dollars worth of commerce under that bridge, and it would be a shame to shut all that down if the bridge collapsed.”