The city of Eureka has all the necessary approvals from state and federal officials and railroad companies needed to continue to the construction phase of the Allenton Bridge replacement project.
The city will accept bid applications from contractors until Tuesday, July 30, with the Board of Aldermen planning to announce the awarded bid at one of its two August meetings.
The board will meet at 7 p.m., Aug. 6 and Aug. 20 at the Timbers Recreation Center, 1 Coffey Park Lane.
The new bridge will be built west of the current, crumbling bridge and will have four lanes for traffic. The bridge runs over both the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads. It connects several Eureka subdivisions along Main Street with Route 66 (or Hwy. 66), and the I-44 on-ramp.
Allenton Bridge was built in 1928. The Missouri Department of Transportation gave the bridge a sufficiency rating of 2 out of 100 in a 2015 inspection.
Mayor Sean Flower said the replacement project has been years in the making. The city needed the proposed architectural design plans approved by the BNSF, Union Pacific, MoDOT, and federal environmental agencies, among others.
Flower said it was “a complicated math problem” to create the designs to meet federal standards while also staying on budget. According to city documents, the bridge is estimated to cost $7 million.
“There’s a ton of hoops to jump through and you have to be very patient, and you have to just keep pounding on it,” Flower said. “I always tell people that there’s probably no harder group to get to move fast than the railroads and the federal government. They’re big and complicated processes and the bridge was also big and complicated.”
According to city documents, a $4 million federal grant called the East-West Transportation Improvement Program grant will be used to pay for the bridge replacement, along with revenue collected from the Proposition E half-cent sales tax.
Prop E was approved by voters in 2018 to fund public safety-related uses, including the bridge project. The city anticipates receiving nearly $10 million from the Prop E sales tax this fiscal year.
Flower said he estimates construction to take about 6-9 months, but once the bid is awarded the contractor should be able to provide more accurate information about the project’s timeline. Some preliminary work has already been completed at the bridge, with Ameren relocating an electrical pole in anticipation of the replacement, Flower said.
“I know (project construction) will be at full speed this fall,” he said.
Flower said getting the new bridge operational falls within one of the three major projects he campaigned for when running for mayor in 2019.
Beginning this January, workers began constructing a new government center, which will hold Eureka’s City Hall, the Municipal Court and Police Station. The building is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
The third project, flood protection, has been previously addressed with creek cleanout efforts and creekbank stabilization. According to city documents, $10 million is allocated in this year’s budget for flood mitigation analysis and implementation, with costs being offset by a $4 million grant from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.
“My biggest goal this year is just operation,” Flower said. “I really want to get that bridge open. I want to get the City Hall open. I want to get the bigger flood mitigation work really in full swing. When I ran, those were three things that I promised I would make significant progress on. I want to see those things roll.”
The Allenton Bridge replacement would open a large swath of land, about 80 acres, for community development. It will also add a more suitable secondary access point for emergency service vehicles and residents in the Ashton Woods and the Legends subdivisions, Flower said.
“It’s definitely an area where, depending on what happens, it could lead to more stores or more offices or something over there which will be beneficial to the whole area,” he said. “I don’t even know if we’ll really see the full impact of it for probably another 10-15 years.”