For the past several years, children and other pedestrians crossing over U.S. 49 along Country Club Road have traversed a narrow path across a bridge built mainly for vehicles between Bonhomie Apartments and Pineview Apartments.
To make crossing safer for area residents, the Forrest County Board of Supervisors is currently taking bids for a 0.48-mile-long pedestrian overpass over the highway near the bridge.
“That small walkway (on the current bridge) is really not a walkway; it’s more of a guardrail to keep cars from running up the outside of the bridge, and that’s what kids have been walking on,” Forrest County District 4 Supervisor Rod Woullard said. “I had one of my constituents … come to my house and ask me to ride up there and take a look at it, and I did.
“And I saw the kids crossing the bridge, and there’s no way two cars can pass on that with kids walking across that bridge. So we have those two apartment complexes … on either side, with a store in between them, and kids are walking back and forth to them. And the kids are walking from Bonhomie to school, so it was a no-brainer (to propose the project).”
Work will entail approximately 100 linear feet of 8-foot-wide, 4-inch-thick concrete sidewalk, as well as a 140-foot-long pedestrian bridge over the highway adjacent to the south side of Country Club Road.
Bids will be taken until 10 a.m. February 15 and must be accompanied by a check in the amount of 5 percent of the total bid price, payable to the Forrest County Board of Supervisors as bid security. Bids can be delivered to the Forrest County Chancery Courthouse Building at 641 Main St. in Hattiesburg and must be in a sealed envelope.
Bids also be mailed to the Forrest County Board of Supervisors, P.O. Box 1310, 641 Main Street, Hattiesburg, MS, 39402, and marked attention to the Purchase Clerk. Submissions must be marked in the lower left-hand corner of the envelope with “Bid For: Pedestrian Overpass Along Country Club Road” and “Bid Opening: 10 a.m., February 15, 2019.”
Bidders choosing to submit electronically are required to contact the board through County Engineer Nicholas Connolly at (601) 544-1821 or by email at nick@sdw.com.
Eighty percent of the work will be covered by a grant from the Metropolitan Planning Organization, with Forrest County and the city of Hattiesburg splitting the remaining 10 percent. If all goes according to plan, the work will be finished sometime between April and June.
“People gravitate to however they can get across 49,” Forrest County District 5 Supervisor Chris Bowen said. “So this is one way they can traverse 49 without having to compete against traffic.
“And right now, with the inattention of the drivers that are out there, we certainly want to do everything we can to keep our pedestrians from having to compete with traffic.”
