June 15 is the new date on which Vicksburg officials have been assured Kanzaa Construction will begin work on the bridge replacement project at Washington and Clark. A contract with that date was eagerly inked by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen at a special called meeting Friday afternoon.

“You have a motion, Mr. Mayor, and I’m glad to make it,” said North Ward Alderman Michael Mayfield of the lone item on the agenda.

“And I’ll make a happy second,” responded Mayor Paul Winfield before the two unanimously approved the deal with Kansas City Southern’s project contractor. South Ward Alderman Sid Beauman was absent.

In a meeting that lasted four minutes, the board essentially put an end to a multi-year search for a solution to one of the city’s biggest transportation dilemmas.

The 200-foot bridge has been closed to all traffic since January 2009 and was troublesome long before that. It crosses a steep cut in the bank about a half-mile from the Mississippi River. Sloughing kept claiming approaches and shifting piers.

As the span connecting Interstate 20 and downtown along the city’s main north-south Washington Street corridor, its continued closure has been a 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, owner of the tracks below, is to pay $4 million.

The contract approved Friday calls for Kanzaa Construction of Topeka, Kan., to construct the new tunnel in two phases at a not-to-exceed cost of $7,889,859 — or not-to-exceed $8.6 million with engineering costs paid to other firms. City Attorney Lee Davis Thames said a notice to proceed on the work will be granted by Thursday, and the contract states Kanzaa must begin work within five days of getting notice. Kanzaa has 12 months to complete the entire bridge replacement project, Thames said.

“This is great day for Vicksburg and the business community,” Winfield said. “This is a project that has lingered for quite some time; several years, in fact.”

The city agreed to the contract price with Kanzaa last summer, but did not have all the funding in place to get the work started because the cost had nearly doubled since officials set aside $5 million of a $16.9 million bond fund for the work in 2006.

Originally under former Mayor Laurence Leyens, city officials began looking to fill the $4 million funding gap in early 2009. With Winfield in office and a Kanzaa-imposed April 1 deadline to get the deal signed, the mayor and aldermen voted in late March to rededicate $3.7 in bond funds — also from the 2006 loan — to the tunnel project.

The bond funds were originally earmarked for paving projects in the North Ward and the final phase of the developing sports complex on Fisher Ferry Road. They will be replenished if a $4 million federal earmark the city formally requested of local legislators in February comes through. The appropriation has made it through committees in both the U.S. House and the Senate, and Winfield has said he expects to know this summer if it will get full approval.

“We definitely need support of our federal delegates, because we need to get those funds,” he said.

Even after the bond funds were shuffled and the tunnel funding was in place, officials saw a few last minute delays. They originally predicted a mid-April ground-breaking date, and later pushed it back a month due to final contract negotiations. For the past two months, Thames said they’ve been waiting on KCS and Kanzaa to deliver the contract that he finally received Friday morning.

“When it saw it on my desk this morning, I got as giddy as a high school kid,” Thames said.

Winfield gave a spirited round of high-fives to his staff members after adjourning the meeting Friday.

Phase one of the project will include the creation of a temporary city street running parallel to the DiamondJacks Casino entrance off Washington Street, just south of the derelict bridge. The casino entrance will be widened into three lanes, two for city traffic and one for casino patrons. The street will connect with Lee Street and will become the new official detour until the tunnel is complete. The tunnel will be finished in phase two, which is expected to start six months after the ground-breaking.