During a Monday meeting, Oktibbeha County supervisors voted unanimously to accept the low bid of $2.2 million from Phillips Contracting of Columbus to pave Longview Road.
It’s the final move to secure a project that has been in the works for years.
Longview Road connects Highway 12 and Highway 25 just west of the Starkville city limits.
Peggy Rogers was one of about 20 residents who live on the unpaved road who watched silently as supervisors gave the go-ahead for the long-awaited project. Rogers opened her bed-and-breakfast, DIMJ Guest House Properties, on Longview Road shortly after retiring as a Lowndes County school administrator two years ago and has been a vocal proponent of the project since.
“This has been kind of like a relay race,” Rogers said after the supervisors’ vote. “For 25 years, people have been trying to get this done. I’m just the last one to pick up the baton, but we’re not to the finish line yet.”
County engineer Clyde Pritchard, who gave the presentation on the project Monday, said it will take about three weeks for the contracts to be approved before work can begin.
“I think, probably, you’re looking at work starting around the end of July,” Pritchard said.
Pritchard said the project to pave the roughly 4-mile stretch of road will be done in phases.
“I’m not sure exactly how that will work, but I’m sure they’ll keep the road open for traffic most of the time, using traffic control,” Pritchard said. “There may be some hours where the road is closed, but most of the time, one lane will be open as they do the work.”
According to the bid specifications, there will be a 300-day schedule for the project, which means the paving will likely be completed a year from now.
“It’s been a long time coming, ” Rogers observed.
Efforts to have the road fixed date as far back as the mid-1990s, when county officials sought federal matching funds for the project that never materialized.
About a year ago, the county succeeded in persuading the Office of State Aid Road Construction to reclassify the road to make it eligible for state funding.
In addition to the $742,000 already set aside as matching funds for the federal funding, the project will be funded by $250,000 in county funds, $750,000 set aside from the BP Oil settlement by the Mississippi Legislature and new state-aid road funds, approximately $458,000.
With the funding now in place, Rogers said she’s looking forward to the work beginning at long last — though she added even the new project raises some concerns.
“I just want to make sure we have a safe road,” Rogers said. “Right now, it’s a big loop from Highway 12 to Highway 25, so when Longview Road is paved, there’s going to be a lot of through traffic, a lot more traffic on the road than there is right now. We need to make sure the road is designed to handle that extra traffic and that it’s safe for the people who live there.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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