FAYETTEVILLE -- The long-awaited restoration of bridges on Lafayette and Maple streets faces further delays.
The city received one bid Friday for roughly $3.6 million from Sweetser Construction of Fayetteville, which was more than double engineers' $1.6 million estimate for the project.
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State law prevents the city from accepting the bid because it's more than 125 percent of engineers' estimates, according to Andrea Rennie, city purchasing agent.
Fayetteville officials could try to redesign the project to lower construction costs or come up with more money and rebid the project as is.
"Back to the drawing board," City Engineer Chris Brown said shortly after bids were opened Friday afternoon.
Officials have talked about rehabbing the bridges, which were built in the 1930s as Works Progress Administration projects, for the better part of a decade.
"It shouldn't be any surprise. We've just been working on this for seven years or so," Mayor Lioneld Jordan said earlier this month when the bridge project was discussed.
The bridges were one of several projects included in a $65.9 million transportation bond program Fayetteville voters approved in 2006. They were to be financed using a third round of bond money, which, initially, was supposed to be available in 2012. The bonds weren't issued until late 2013.
City officials welcomed $1 million in federal money from the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, but the contribution meant all designs for the project had to be reviewed by the state agency.
Brown added the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program also had to approve project plans because the bridges are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
"It took several months to kind of work through what all the different aspects were," he said.
The bridges' railings, for instance, are low by today's standard.
"If we were just going to rebuild those bridges, we would build a much taller railing," Brown said. "The public feedback wasn't really very positive about that" and the Historic Preservation Program didn't really like that idea either, he said.
The entire deck of the Maple Street bridge will be replaced, putting it out of commission for several months, according to designs by McClelland Consulting Engineers. City officials initially had hoped to do the majority of the work during the summer when fewer students are on campus at the University of Arkansas.
Repair to the Lafayette Street bridge are more aesthetic in nature. The guardrail will be replaced, including a section on the north side that was damaged when a vehicle struck it more than a decade ago. Brown said metal plates the bridge deck sits on will be replaced, and a retaining wall between the bridge and West Avenue will be reinforced.
Light fixtures resembling what was in place in the 1930s are set to go in on both bridges, and wider sidewalks were included on both sides of the bridges, too.
Brown said prior to Friday's bid opening that it was taking longer than usual to find interested bidders because the project "has a lot of specialty aspects to it."
He added he expects construction to take about six months to complete once work begins.
"It's going to be a short-term disruption to the way things go down there, but, long-term, it's going to be a really good project," Brown said.
NW News on 06/27/2015