Bridge settlement to pay off another bridge

A portion of the $375,000 received last week from Great River Engineering as part of the Main Street bridge settlement will be going to pay off the cost of another bridge.
“A significant part of it will go to rebuild the Munger Lane bridge that we built three or four months ago. That was obviously an unbudgeted project. We did not know the Munger Lane bridge was going to collapse,” said Hannibal City Manager Jeff LaGarce of the project which cost the city $138,000 to replace.
The previous Munger Lane bridge was damaged on May 1 after rainwater runoff in Minnow Creek eroded a portion of the earth that supported the roadway’s asphalt surface, causing it to crack and buckle. That bridge reopened to traffic in early August.
The money that isn’t used to reimburse the cost of the new bridge will be placed in the city’s General Fund.
When the city council decided to push forward with the project to reinforce the Main Street bridge in 2007, like the Munger Lane bridge, it was not a budgeted project.
“We had our street projects lined up, so there was no room in the revenue stream to rebuild a bridge of that magnitude,” said LaGarce. “When the city decided to go ahead and get the bridge rebuilt because it needed to be rebuilt, the only way to do that was to pay for it out of our own pocket. This settlement amount essentially repays us for having to dig deep into our pocket for a project that we actually had difficulty funding at the time.”
The bid of Bross Construction, which was the lone bidder for the Main Street bridge renovation project, was $324,946. The bid was accepted by the city council at its Dec. 18, 2007, meeting.