Downtown Columbus is one step closer to seeing the construction of its first roundabout along Main Street.
The city council voted unanimously Tuesday evening to award a $761,000 contract for the construction of a small roundabout at Main and Second streets near Harvey’s restaurant. Phillips Contracting Company earned the job with the lowest bid.
An additional roughly $100,000 will be paid to Neel-Schaffer Engineering, which will conduct inspections and testing on the construction site, as required by the Mississippi Department of Transportation, said City Engineer Kevin Stafford.
“They require an inspector on the site (for) half a day, so that fund has to be included as part of the project,” Stafford told The Dispatch.
MDOT will cover at least $689,000, or 80 percent, of the costs, but has agreed to pay up to $717,000 depending on final project costs. The city will pay the remaining roughly $172,000.
As a part of a planned $4.5 million traffic improvement project, the roundabout will be the first of several planned along the corridor that connects downtown Columbus to Highways 82 and 182.
Stafford previously told The Dispatch the roundabout would be efficient in slowing down traffic “hydroplaning off the road coming into town and out of town.” Sixty percent of the accidents at the downtown corridor took place at the Main and Second intersection, he said.
No construction schedule has been set at this time, Stafford told The Dispatch.
“We did the bid today,” he said. “(It’ll) probably be two to three months from now before we can ever get a true schedule (out).”
City employees returning to regular schedule
In other business, Mayor Robert Smith announced during the meeting that city employees will return to their regular schedule starting Monday, coinciding with the date when Gov. Tate Reeves’ shelter in place order is supposed to expire.
The mayor reduced work hours for most city employees two weeks ago. Instead of working from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, most city departments began working from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on April 1.
The city’s public works department and the garage maintained a schedule from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. after the hour cut. The police and fire departments were excluded from the hour reduction and maintained their regular schedules.
Smith said during the meeting one of the reasons for the reduction was to cut down expense.
“(Including saving) gas and mobilization … there were several factors when we changed it,” he said.
But Ward 4 Councilman Pierre Beard moved Tuesday night to change the city’s public works department’s schedule. Rather than working 10-hour days four days a week, he said, he hoped to change it to eight-hour days Monday through Friday.
“(I made the motion) because of the work that I can say is not getting done in my ward,” Beard said during the meeting.
Although the proposed total hours would stay the same, Beard told The Dispatch his proposed schedule would allow the department to process work requests that may come in on Thursdays.
“Say … Thursday you got a lot of yard work being done,” Beard said. “Friday morning, you have nobody to pick it up. So it sits there all day Friday, it sits there all day Saturday, Sunday, whatever day.”
Ward 5 Stephen Jones, however, proposed a discussion across the board at the next council meeting for every city department to switch to a five-day schedule. He said council members could discuss with department heads about the pros and cons between the current and proposed schedules.
Jones could not be reached for comment by press time.
The council voted 5-1 in favor of tabling the discussion until the next meeting.
Beard was the lone dissenting vote. He told The Dispatch he was against Jones’ proposal because he only contacted council members for a change to the public works department’s schedule and did not have time to research on other city departments.
Yue Stella Yu was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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