A crumbling, long-decaying bridge on Commerce Drive that provides access from the West Outer Road to almost 150 homes and several businesses just outside Arnold is expected to be replaced soon.
It looks like Jefferson County officials will have to use eminent domain to acquire a piece of property for the bridge replacement project, though.
Public Works Director Jason Jonas said the county has wanted to replace the bridge for years.
“We really want to get it started,” he said.
One lane of the current two-lane bridge, which spans Black Creek, has been closed for some time, and the rest of the structure isn’t in good shape, either, Jonas said.
“Fox C-6 school buses haven’t used it for years, and the (Rock Fire Protection) district won’t use it, either,” he said.
The county’s involvement with the bridge started a few years ago, thanks to Don Robbins, the former president of the homeowners association for the Willow Trace subdivision that has 27 homes using the bridge for primary access to the outer road. Another 115 homes in the neighboring Sierra Vista subdivision also use the bridge.
Robbins said there are a couple of circuitous routes in and out of the subdivisions as alternatives to Commerce Drive and its problematic bridge, but most use the Commerce Drive span.
“They’re (the alternate routes) what the Fox school buses use, and any emergency calls have to go the long way around, too, which, of course, reduces response time,” he said.
When he was the Willow Trace HOA president, Robbins heard about the county starting a new program to take over maintenance of eligible subdivision streets and bridges.
While subdivision streets must meet certain standards before the county will take them over, Jonas, who proposed the program and coordinates it, has said he wants to bring as many bridges as possible under county control because most subdivision homeowners associations lack the financial wherewithal to maintain, replace or repair failing bridges.
When working to get Willow Trace and Sierra Vista into the county’s program, Robbins knew he also needed to enlist the support of several businesses in front of the two subdivisions – whose customers and staff also brave the Commerce Drive bridge – because the industrial park owned the bridge.
“I worked to get Willow Trace and Sierra Vista into the county’s subdivision streets maintenance program, and I had to work to get the (Imperial Industrial Park) into it as well,” Robbins said. “The businesses there had let its association lapse years ago, and I knew that I needed to get them into the county’s program for us to have that bridge replaced.”
The industrial park includes Transmissions to Go, USA Insulation, Synergy Collaborative Workspace, HomeSource Custom Homes, Painting Solutions and Guide Financial-Nationwide Insurance.
“We accepted the industrial park’s street into the subdivision street maintenance program in October 2020,” Jonas said. “We inspected the bridge with MoDOT (the Missouri Department of Transportation) in January 2021. We knew there were problems. MoDOT had been prepared to address that bridge years ago when people there thought it was their bridge. But it wasn’t. It belonged to the industrial park.”
Jonas said the MoDOT inspection concluded that the lane on the south side of the bridge needed to be closed immediately.
“It was in bad shape, and we were told that allowing driving on it was like putting weight on a broken foot. It’s not going to work out real well,” Jonas said.
He said soon after the inspection, his department applied for federal matching funds administered by the state’s Off-System Bridge Replacement and Rehabilitation program.
“MoDOT approved it in the summer of 2021. We got an engineering firm under contract and figured that we were well on our way to getting the bridge replaced,” he said. “We knew engineering work could take six to eight months, so we started to acquire land for right of way for the work in April 2022.”
Progress grinds to a halt
Then the project bogged down.
“We were able to secure two of the parcels we needed within the first couple of months, but with the third (needed property, which a business in the industrial park owns) we have never been able to lock in on a deal,” Jonas said. “We have offered what we believe are fair and reasonable offers, but we’re as close to closing that deal as we were when we started.
“Right-of-way acquisition is a strange animal. It can take a couple of months or three years; you never know.”
With no compromise in sight, Jonas said, the next step is to acquire the right-of-way agreement through the eminent domain process, in which the county will ask a Circuit Court judge to award the needed land to the county and set the price for compensation to the owner.
“We decided to seek eminent domain earlier this year, but the timing wasn’t right because that was right after (longtime County Counselor) Wes Yates was appointed judge, and the county counselor’s office was understaffed,” he said.
“Now that we have a new county counselor (Jalesia F.M. Kuenzel), things are starting to move. We hope to have the County Council’s approval to proceed with eminent domain in September, and we can file it by October.
“Once a judge decides on the proper compensation, we will be ready to go because we’ve already got the plans drawn up. We’d like to get construction started in early spring of next year.”
Jonas said when engineers designed the new bridge in 2021, the construction cost was estimated at $800,000.
“Of course, we all know what inflation has done to a number to construction costs. We estimated that it would be an 80-20 match, but it probably will end up 70-30 or maybe even 65-35,” he said, with the rest coming from the county’s share of a half-cent sales tax for road and bridge improvements.
“The grant specifies that we must have the bridge done by late in 2025. So we’re still on schedule to get it done in 2024, but we would have liked to have been much further along by now.”
Jonas said the existing bridge was built in 1986.
“Ideally, we’d like to get 50 years out of a bridge, but this is a metal beam bridge, and it needs to be cleaned and maintained about every decade or things can go wrong, and with this bridge, things have definitely gone wrong,” he said. “Just about everything can do a number on a steel beam bridge, including water and salt.”
Jonas said it will be replaced with a structural concrete bridge, which now is the standard. In addition, Commerce Drive from the West Outer Road to San Simeon Drive, where the two subdivisions come in, will be resurfaced.
“That’s about 1,000 feet of pavement,” Jonas said. “The metal railing of the current bridge will instead be a concrete barrier, and guardrails will be installed on the sides of the bridge, which currently have none to prevent a vehicle from going into the creek. It will be better for everyone all around.”
Robbins said he’s happy the long saga of getting a new bridge may be winding down.
“It’s really a shame that one oddball is holding up the progress and all this work,” he said. “It will be good to finally see this happen.”