The City Council voted Monday to approve a contract with Wildcat Construction Co. to complete the Tuxedo Bridge rehabilitation project.
The project includes replacement of the westbound bridge and bank stabilization under both the westbound and eastbound bridges.
Wildcat Construction, the low bidder on the project, will be paid $1,513,685, which is $203,685 over the available budget of $1,310,000. The remaining funds will be provided through savings in the Indiana Street rehabilitation project, which was completed by the City’s Public Works Department.
The bridge has been limited to one lane for westbound traffic since January 2023, when a pothole in the inside lane required temporary repair. Voters had already approved a $1.2 million bridge rehabilitation during the 2020 General Obligation bond election, so repairs were postponed until the rehab project moved forward in an effort to save money.
However, in preparation for the project, environmental studies revealed the possible presence of federally-protected bat and mussel species on or under the bridge that could have been impacted during construction. This notification set the project back further.
Then bids sought for the project last month exceeded the budgeted funds, requiring some preventative maintenance components of the project, including rehabilitation of the eastbound and overflow bridges, to be delayed until a later date.
“We had hoped to include some preventative maintenance to the eastbound bridge and the overflow bridge while we had everything closed, but the bids with those components greatly exceeded the budgeted amount,” said Director of Engineering Micah Siemers. “With those items removed, the cost to replace the decking on the westbound bridge and stabilize the banks, while still over-budget, is within our scope due to $230,000 we had in savings from the Indiana Overlay Project. So $26,000 of those funds will be used to complete the funding for the bridge project.”
“We will know more by early November, once we get contracts and bonds back from the contractor and set up a pre-construction meeting to discuss the start date,” Siemers said.
Construction on the project is expected to take approximately seven months.