The Austrian physicist and philosopher Erwin Schrodinger, in a famous thought experiment, asked us to imagine a closed box containing a cat and a timed device. The device may go off sometime between now and six hours from now, when we will open the box. When it goes off it will kill the cat. Whether it has gone off can't be determined without opening the box. Schrodinger asked whether, in that six-hour period, the question "Is the cat alive or dead?" has any meaning. In his view, which he likened to quantum states of particles, until the box is opened Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead: in physical language the cat's two possible states exist in superposition until the box is opened.
In June, afte the Washington legislature rejected a measure to fund $450 million of the Columbia River Crossing, Governors Kitzhaber of Oregon and Inslee of Washington declared the CRC dead. Dead it may have been declared, but pieces kept on twitching, to the point that three weeks later Willamette Week called the CRC a Zombridge, as the CRC team continued to work on getting the DEQ to approve pier work in the river, and the Coast Guard continued its review of the CRC team's application for a permit to obstruct the river. Since then it's been announced that the two states' departments of transportation have agreed to pay off two businesses that the bridge would hurt, and the Oregon Department of Transportation has agreed to pay off a third business in the same situation. Governor Kitzhaber has made noises about calling the Oregon legislature into special session on September 30, ostensibly to deal with PERS, but the behind-the-scenes talk is that he will also ask the legislature to fund the CRC whether or not Washington chips in. And yesterday evening, the C-TRAN board (Clark County's trasportation district) voted to get back into the CRC planning process.
So: is the Columbia River Crossing alive or dead? Or is it, like Schrodinger's cat, alive and dead at the same time? We'll open the box on September 30 and find out.