If the tunnel-and-road project at Washington and Clark streets had begun in June 2010 under the same set of rules governing smaller bridge replacements on Fisher Ferry and Redbone roads, Kansas City Southern Railway would be on the hook for about $52,000 in late fees and reach $129,000 by the latest end date for the project, based on schedules used in Mississippi for state-subsidized road and bridge improvements.

Even if extensions on the uniquely configured contract continue, the city is content to let the process play out without asking the railroad for any penalties, Mayor Paul Winfield said.

“I just don’t think so,” he said when asked if the city plans to press KCS for liquidated damages, common in state-funded bridge work but not applicable to the contract for the city-owned bridge. “It would just get caught up in litigation. It’s too late in the game to go back.”

The city and the railroad expect a tunnel with a road atop it to be completed in February 2012 — eight months after a first deadline passed in June and five months after a Sept. 30 target date was scratched. No time-related penalties are due the city from KCS.

Repeated requests of KCS in the past month to address the issue of time-related penalties, or lack thereof, have come up empty. A letter to the editor printed Sunday in The Vicksburg Post from KCS said the railroad sought to be “a positive corporate citizen” in Vicksburg and attributed delays on the project, now in its 16th month, to the city’s geology — “a particular kind of soil at this location which has a tremendous tendency to shift and flow when wet,” said the letter, signed by KCS spokesman C. Doniele Carlson.

“This geological issue is what caused the closure of the bridge,” the letter said. “It is not surprising that the project has been difficult to complete.”

Winfield didn’t cite the letter specifically, but backed up the railroad’s contention that the earth itself has kept the intersection closed.

“Their experts underestimated the soil,” he said, adding the railroad is already required to pay an extra $1.6 million to keep an inspector with TranSystems, the city’s project engineer, at the work area. Truck access to the site as retaining walls are built in a tight space along the rail tracks was cited as a reason to extend the contract a second time.

“I’m doing everything short of getting a jackhammer and getting out there myself,” Winfield said.

Garnet Van Norman, the city’s public works director, said the strain and stress of equipping his department with required hard hats and safety glasses to work around railroad right of way relegated the city to a backup role from the moment the cost climbed from the $5 million set aside by the Leyens administration in 2006.

“This is nothing like anything I’ve ever worked on,” Van Norman said. “The railroad is just a different animal.”

Weighing in on the city’s grudging acceptance of the pace of work, or any one city’s public works decisions, is too touchy for the Mississippi Municipal League.

“We usually don’t comment on decisions of our members, especially by the city boards,” MML deputy director Shari T. Veazey said.

In the county, progress on relief bridges on Fisher Ferry Road at the Big Black River and on Redbone Road at Paces Bayou have penalties in place if work runs longer than times spelled out in separate contracts on each task.

Terms of a $541,845.62 offer in March from Laurel-based Magco Inc. tied the company to replace the aging span at Redbone in 90 working days, a time frame common in construction with wiggle room for unplanned events that affect work schedules, usually bad weather or delays involving material goods. Through mid-September, the job is 69 percent through that schedule and its overall item list was 83 percent complete, said Brian Robbins of ABMB Engineers Inc., the county’s engineering firm.

At Fisher Ferry, where one of two new spans is complete, Vicksburg-based Fordice Construction was about 50 percent through its $1,599,000 job to replace twin spans. Traffic has been detoured in both locations much of the year. Progress reports on the project to reflect activity through Sept. 30 are still pending from each contractor, Robbins said. Engineers expect the Redbone bridge to be finished before year’s end, while a second span on Fisher Ferry is expected to last beyond Jan. 1.

Both are financed by the Office of State Aid Road Construction, a state-supported entity that assists counties to maintain roads and bridges and administers the Local System Bridge Program, which pays for replacing deficient bridges but leaves out those on municipal urban systems. OSARC operates out of the Mississippi Department of Transportation offices in Jackson, but has its own staff and chief engineer.

When work runs late on a “state aid” job, liquidated damages are charged to compensate the county and state to keep engineers, inspectors and others on the job after a contract expires. The late fees are based on overall cost of work, ranging from $100 a day for contracts up to $25,000 and $1,400 a day for those more than $10 million, according to the Mississippi State Specifications for State Aid Road and Bridge Construction — referred to in government circles as the “green book.” Based on where they fall on the penalty scale, late fees will cost Magco $300 a day and Fordice $400 if working days expire before the jobs are complete.

If a new Redbone bridge is late, Magco is subject to be required to pay $300 a day in liquidated damages — fees charged to compensate the county and state for keeping engineers, inspectors and others on the job after a contract on a “state aid” job expires.

“It’s all specified in the green book,” Robbins said. “But, with the railroad… they tend to do what they want to do.”

Trains that traveled on the track that snakes its way onto the U.S. 80 bridge had done so with a bridge overhead from 1929 to January 2009, when it was closed due to fast-eroding banks that supported it. Before Interstate 20 was completed and U.S. 61 bypassed most of Vicksburg proper in the 1970s, the bridge was maintained by the state. In later years, the bridge became a city asset and thus ineligible for state funds usually tapped by counties to help pay for replacing either pilings or entire bridges.