CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Voters approved the city's latest $125 million bond on Tuesday, which will pay for 32 projects.
The projects include everything from streets, public safety and library improvements. However, there's still a project from 10 years ago that remains unfinished.
10 years ago, residents approved Bond 2012, but one project, which was supposed to be a complete reconstruction from Palm Drive to Crosstown never got done. That's because City engineer Jeff Edmonds told 3NEWS that the state took a long time to figure out if Leopard Street was going to go over Crosstown or under.
"Originally Leopard was going to go under the main lanes of the Harbor Bridge and after they studied the project, the developer decided it was going to be more economical to make leopard a bridge," he said.
After that delay, the 2012 project had been awarded to a company to start work on. Meanwhile, there's also a Bond 2014 project along Commodores that was finished. It was simply a building to house city maintenance equipment, but there were disputes over where it should be located. The third site was finally agreed on.
"Even with that there was some opposition to assigning it there. So, we had to clear that gate and get agreement that it was the proper site for the project before we could get started," he said.
That project is now also almost complete.
Edmonds admits that some of the more recent city bond projects are not where they want them to be.
"Some of those projects have encountered some delays," he said.
Edmonds says that during the first quarter of next year he's estimating that a couple of dozen Street projects are going to go out for bid. Councilman Roland Barrera said to keep delays at a minimum in the future the council came up with ways to speed up the whole bond process.
"We have pre-qualified the engineers, we've already decided which projects we're going to target so that way as soon as the bonds are approved, then we can start awarding them to the engineers for the engineering phase," he said. "Then from that standpoint, hopefully that gets them into a phase where they're getting them completed in two years."
The city engineer also says city council gave staff the authority to negotiate contracts and to even award them up to a certain amount of money all in an effort to get bond projects from now on done more quickly.
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