Six years after a project to repair the Belvidere Road bridge over the Amstitz Expressway was put on hold, the city of Waukegan is wrapping up its preliminary engineering.
But, the move doesn’t necessarily mean that the bridge is next on the city’s to-do list, Mayor Sam Cunningham said.
Instead, the city is waiting to receive the results of the infrastructure and capital improvement assessments currently, which will provide the city an outline of what projects need to get done, how much they’ll cost and what order makes the most sense, Cunningham said.
The assessments will allow the City Council to make better decisions about how to allocate its resources, he said, pointing to the demolition last year of a vacant industrial building formerly owned by Bombardier Recreational Products, or BRP, and before that Outboard Marine Corp.
After the demolition was approved and started, some aldermen said they might have made a different decision had they known about other pending expenses.
Cunningham said he thinks the assessments will give aldermen more information before making decisions on whether to pursue opportunities like the BRP building.
The decision to move forward with the Belvidere Road bridge engineering came about after city staff learned they may have to repay the federal Department of Transportation the money it had sent the city back when the project was originally approved, Cunningham said at the council meeting.
The city had received a federal grant in 2008 that would reimburse the city 80 percent of the preliminary engineering costs for the city, according to council documents.
But when the economic downturn happened, the project was put on hold, said Tina Smigielski, the city’s finance director.
The engineering firm Ciorba Group had completed about $50,000 of the original $125,000 contract and been reimbursed by the federal government about $40,000 by the time the work was officially put on hold in 2011, according to council documents.
The council voted to re-hire the firm Monday evening to do remaining of the work, estimated to cost about $74,000, according to documents. The city’s share will be just under $15,000.
While public works staff was aware of the work, it had not been communicated to the finance department and was not included in this year’s budget, Smigielski said.
The cost is manageable, but it would have been preferable for it to have been included in the regular budgeting process, she said.
The city is facing a projected $2.5 million deficit in the budget it approved this past summer — before the state passed its own budget cutting into the city’s home-rule sales tax and its share of income-tax revenue.
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