By Matt Schury
Motorists who drive the River Road Bridge over the Blackberry Creek in Yorkville may get a Christmas present next year.
“Hopefully by next Christmas we’re driving on it,” Kendall County Board member Bob Davidson, who chairs the County Board’s Highway Committee, said this week.
The optimism comes in the wake of a flurry of documents that were approved by the state and federal government giving the green light to the project, according to Fran Klaas, Kendall County’s highway engineer.
“We’ve had a watershed of events happen in the last week and have basically gotten almost everything we needed to make this a real project and make it happen,” Klaas said.
River Road Bridge is located just west of Route 47. It has been closed to traffic since the spring when Illinois Department of Transportation inspectors found large cracks under the bridge and deemed it “unsafe for vehicular travel.”
“We got the OK to purchase the land. We got permits in hand from DNR. We got everybody’s blessing now,” Davidson said. “If everything goes right we are off to the races as long as nobody throw a wrench in the gears.”
Klaas said a March 9 letting is slated with construction to begin May. The bridge is expected to open in late fall 2012. Klaas said the latest estimated price tag is $1.5 to $2 million.
Davidson added that there are federal and state dollars that will be matched for the project. He explained that the county will pay the cost and for the engineering and preliminary work. Yorkville is expected to pay the county back over two years.
“Once we put it to bid and we get it let, then the City of Yorkville takes over,” Davidson said.
Among the documents approved were a preliminary bridge design and hydraulic report and a project development report from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
“We had to get the project development plan approved now or this just wasn’t going to happen,” Klaas said.
Klaas said they could now buy land, finish the design and build the project.
“Our hands are tied until we get that project development report approval,” he said. “That’s the big hurdle.”
The county also received a dam safety permit from IDNR that allows them to modify the west end of the dam where it attaches to the abutment of the bridge.
The IDNR is involved because of a creek dam that is adjacent to the bridge.
The county will have to put a temporary extension wall in as they build the new bridge. Since the state controls the dam, the county couldn’t do this without a safety permit from IDNR, Klaas explained.
As for the dam itself, Klaas said the state is going to almost completely remove the dam and replace it with a series of step down structures to slow down the Blackberry Creek as it meets the old dam.
Davidson said the county received assistance from Rep. Kay Hatch (R-Yorkville) and Rep. Tom Cross (R-Oswego) who they have been working this summer and fall to get IDNR approval.
“They helped us immensely push this thing through,” Davidson said. “When you’re in politics and you’re a little bit up the ladder, you can pick up the phone and get people to start paying attention.”
Still, Davidson said he thinks this could have been finished more quickly.
“This shouldn’t have been this difficult to get done,” Davidson said.
Tony Scott contributed to this story.
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