With hopes of breaking ground in the coming weeks, the City of Vicksburg continues to wait on Kansas City Southern and Kanzaa Construction to sift through a proposed contract for the tunnel project at Washington and Clark streets, officials said Wednesday.

“We have done all that we possibly can do to get that project started,” said Mayor Paul Winfield. “The ball is in their court, and hopefully we’ll hear something positive from them soon.”

The bridge has been closed to all traffic since January 2009. As the lone span connecting Insterstate 20 and downtown along the city’s main north-south Washington Street corridor, its continued closure has become a major headache for motorists, residents, business owners and politicians alike. The 80-year-old bridge is to be replaced with a road-topped rail tunnel, of which KCS is to pay $4 million.

The city verbally agreed to a not-to-exceed $8.6 million contract with Kanzaa Construction last summer, but did not have all the funding in place to ink the deal. The Topeka, Kan., company gave the city an April deadline to find the funds and get the project moving at the agreed-upon price or have it rebid.

With the deadline looming, the mayor and aldermen voted to rededicate $3.7 in bond funds to the tunnel project that had been borrowed in 2006 and earmarked for paving projects in the North Ward and the final phase of the developing sports complex on Fisher Ferry Road.

Winfield said KCS and Kanzaa are still discussing details of the proposed contract the city submitted. The mayor, who had previously held out hopes for an early April ground-breaking, said he expects to hear something from KCS and Kanzaa Construction in the coming weeks.

“We’re almost there,” he said, noting workers will be on the ground within 10 days of the contract’s signing.

Meanwhile, the $4 million federal earmark the city formally requested of local legislators in February appears to be making progress.

“It’s made it through committee in both the House and the Senate,” Winfield said, “so that’s a positive sign.”

If approved, the earmark would replenish the bond funds the board rededicated to the tunnel project. The city originally set aside $5 million of a $16.9 bond in 2006 for the bridge replacement, however, cost estimates nearly doubled by the time bids were taken on the work last spring.