In the 14 months since the Washington Street rail overpass at Clark Street has been closed, Al Sellers said business at his nearby convenience store is off by at least 40 percent.

“It’s basically been devastated,” said Sellers, who has owned the Red Lion Food Store at 3600 Washington St. for five years. “Really, I’m just trying to hold on and pay the note. I’m not making any money.” Sellers said he has cut back hours and tried to adjust his inventory to keep overhead down.

Across the street at Mississippi Rubber Company, owner Ronny Fleming said the situation is every bit as dire.

“It’s just absolutely killing us,” said Fleming, who has operated at 3525 Washington St. for 20 years. “It’s cut off all of our cash business, and it’s gotten to the point where we’ve been trying to decide whether or not to close for the past two or three months.”

On the north side of the closed bridge, traffic is detoured off Washington Street onto Lee Street about a quarter mile before the bridge. On the south side, traffic is diverted onto North Frontage Road another quarter mile before the bridge.

The entrance to DiamondJacks Casino and Hotel is also inside a stretch of the roadway posted closed except to local traffic. Although signs at the barricades make clear the casino, one of five in the city, is still open, the absence of through traffic has had an effect.

“Our local customers, they know we’re open and they’re finding us. But the out-of-town visitors, they see the road closed signs and they don’t know what to do; they’re not sure if they can go through or not — even though we’ve got our signs up,” said Felicia Gavin, DiamondJacks general manager. “We’re missing a segment of our business — our tourist segment. We’re entering our peak season for tourist visitors, and I think we’ll be impacted slightly this year because of it.”

Mayor Paul Winfield inherited the challenge of finding funds to replace the overpass when he took office in July, and said he’s now hoping to get traffic flowing on Washington Street perhaps by diverting funds from another project.

Following several recent trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby local delegates, his administration’s latest effort was to file a formal request for the funds via a federal earmark. Regardless of whether the federal appropriation comes through, Winfield said he is working to get the project split into two phases to get construction under way as early as next month.

The problem with the short bridge is continued sloughing of steep bluffs rising from the railroad level. Supports have been undermined. The solution is to create a rail tunnel, top it with soil and a roadway.

When the city began planning for the bridge replacement in 2006, it estimated the cost at $5 million and set aside that much of a $16.9 million bond issue for the work. The Federal Railroad Administration is to reimburse the city $4 million. However, when bids were taken in early 2009 the cost had grown to nearly twice the original estimate.

A not-to-exceed $8.6 million agreement was reached last summer with Kanza Construction of Topeka, Kan., after months of negotiations, but the project has been stalled due to the lack of funds. City officials have since been scrambling to fill the $4 million funding gap.

Robert Summers, who has worked at Mississippi Rubber for four years, said he’s lucky to see a handful of customers come in the store each day since the bridge was closed. Some delivery trucks have quit coming to the business altogether — unable to make the tight detour turns — and others are stopping in the city before they reach the detour and calling Summers to have him meet them for deliveries.  

“Honestly, I don’t know what I’ll do if this place closes,” said Summers, who speculated he might be able to continue working for Fleming at a similar business in Jackson. “But that would be like taking a pay cut to drive there every day, and things are already pretty tight the way it is.”

Summers’ boss said he’s pleaded with the city to move the detour signs back to the bridge to allow more drive-by traffic. Bubba Rainer, city public works director, said the signs were placed at the actual detour turns to cut down on confusion and try to avoid traffic snarls.

“You try to set up the best detour route for the public to keep it as easy to follow as possible, but not everybody is going to win,” said Rainer. “It’s a bad situation. It’s been an ongoing headache, really ever since we started closing (the overpass) to heavy truck traffic in 2006.”

Sellers said most out-of-town travelers who get tangled up in the Washington Street detour end up aborting their plans in Vicksburg altogether.

“We get people in here all the time asking how to get around the bridge to the casinos or wherever, and when you start trying to explain it to them they just get this glazed look over their face, like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’” he said. “I mean, if you’re passing through and you pull off at the welcome center and they start telling you about all these detours, what are you going to do? You’re probably going to get back on the interstate and keep driving.”

It’s not just the businesses trapped outside the detour route that are feeling the pinch. Along the entire stretch of Washington Street — the city’s main north-south corridor from Interstate 20 to downtown — businesses are feeling the effects of the bridge closure. 

“It’s having a negative impact on all of the businesses in the area, all the way to downtown, I know they’re all saying it’s been detrimental, too,” said Christi Kilroy, Vicksburg-Warren County Chamber of Commerce executive director. “There’s not a time that I got out in a social or business situation where I don’t get asked about it. Everyone is suffering, and they’re frustrated.”

The most common question or complaint, said Kilroy: “The thing they all say is, ‘I’m hearing about all these shovel-ready stimulus projects on TV and in the newspapers — how can it be that we don’t qualify?’

“That’s their biggest frustration, and that’s ours,” she continued. “It’s complicated, but from what we’ve been told it’s because rail money can’t be matched with stimulus funds from the highway department.” 

Both Sellers and Fleming said they’d be more optimistic about the future of their businesses if the city had a reliable timetable to replace the 80-year-old bridge, which closed to all traffic Jan. 23, 2009.

Winfield said that might come soon. “We have gotten some response from Kanza basically stating we can still move forward at the amount we’ve agreed on if we can get a deal in place by the end of March,” the mayor said. “Talking to the engineering firm, it looks like we can break this into two phases … and we have enough money in hand to pay for the first phase and get this project under way.”

Winfield said he hopes to use approximately $2.2 million in bond money dedicated to the developing sports complex on Fisher Ferry Road and another $1.5 million dedicated to a third phase of a cityswide paving project to get the tunnel project going.

“By the time we get to phase two, which I believe would be May or June, then we should be getting the response from Congress on the appropriation,” Winfield said.

If the federal earmark comes through, Winfield said the sports complex and paving money would be replenished. If it doesn’t, he said the ball park  — which has also been stalled due to the pullout of private partners and construction challenges — might have to be put on hold.

“We have to be prudent with our funds and make tough choices, and to me, the bridge is more critical than anything at this point,” the mayor said. “But, between my travels up (to Washington D.C.) and the community’s coordinated effort to get this earmark, I believe we’re going to get it and we’ll be able to replenish those other funds.”

Winfield said he anticipated bringing the issue of using the ball park funds to get the tunnel project under contract before the board of mayor and aldermen soon, likely at its regular meeting Thursday.

The first phase of the project would include creating a connector road between Washington and Lee streets via the DiamondJacks entrance on the south side of the closed bridge. The existing two-lane entrance would be widened by a lane, with one lane dedicated to casino traffic and the remaining two for city traffic.

“If we can get the contract signed by the end of the month, I’d expect them to be on the ground and working on the first phase by the first or second week of April,” said Winfield.

Completion of the phase one connector road would provide for a second, less inconvenient detour route, but the actual bridge replacement would not be included until the second phase of construction — which the mayor said he does not believe will take as long as originally estimated.

“This entire project can probably be completed in 10 months,” he said. “It’s not going to take a year to 18 months, as I’ve seen it estimated before.”

In the meantime, Sellers and his fellow business owners on Washington Street will continue to take any business they can get.

“If they would just start doing something on the bridge — any work at all — it would help the store. If nothing else, just because of the construction workers it would bring in,” said Sellers. “It’s that sensitive of a situation.”

Contact Steve Sanoski at ssanoski@vicksburgpost.com