Mississippi has 10,729 bridges enabling travelers to criss-cross its territory from the sands of the Gulf Coast to the corner of Tishomingo County just north of the city of Iuka, right near the Tennessee and Alabama state lines. As of last week, according to the Office of State Aid Road Construction, 465 of those Mississippi bridges are closed. Thirteen of the closed bridges are in Jones County, according to OSARC’s report. That’s down from a high of 27 closed bridges back in the spring of 2018, when Governor Phil Bryant issued a proclamation on April 10, 2018, to force the shutdown of bridges across the state, specifically in 16 named counties. Jones County was one of the 16 counties that the governor’s order named.
The governor’s order read, in part, that the named counties “and other parts of the State of Mississippi have been and continue to be affected by structurally deficient bridge conditions that create extreme peril to the safety of persons and property and thus state assistance will be necessary to support local government response efforts.” Also, the governor’s action came on the heels of a report from the Federal Highway Administration that “verified that many unsafe bridges previously identified for closure were not closed by local authorities.”
However concerned the governor may have been about “extreme peril” to residents and “unsafe bridges,” it seems his proclamation could also have been prompted by the threat of the Mississippi Department of Transportation losing hundreds of millions of federal highway dollars.
At least one Jones County supervisor thinks that may have been the case.
“All I’m telling you is that I want fairness, and we haven’t been treated fairly,” said Jones County Beat 3 Supervisor Barry Saul in an interview not long after another round of bridge closures in the spring of this year. “We haven’t been treated like MDOT treats themselves, and we haven’t been treated like the Federal Highway Administration treats their interstate bridges."
“You can read this book,” continued Saul, pulling out a book that he said all 82 counties receive every other year. “This is the engineering report from an outside consulting firm. The entire time I’ve been supervisor, every other year we get one of these books, and no where in this book does it say a bridge is in critical condition (in Jones County) and needs to be closed. Nowhere in this book will you find imminent danger of a bridge. You will find critical findings where maintenance needs to be performed. You’ll find pages in this that says, ‘When money is available, consider this bridge for replacement.’”
Saul said supervisors could have found reasons to close over half the bridges in the county five or ten years ago, but the citizens of Jones County would have been very upset due to the inconveniences posed in trying to get to work and church and in transporting their kids to school – not to mention the challenges the closed bridges cause law enforcement and emergency management personnel.
“Do you think the people of Jones County were going to let their Board of Supervisors close over half of the bridges in their county at one time that we weren’t instructed to and let it lie? It wouldn’t have happened,” added Saul. “There would have been an uprising, and I don’t blame them. I would have been right there picketing along with them.”
Saul does not deny that Jones County has had to deal with some road and bridge problems, but he doesn’t like the way the supervisors were wrongly, in his opinion, cast into the spotlight on the issue.
“Have we got deficient bridges in Jones County? Sure we do. Do most counties have deficient bridges? They all do. I just want to be treated fairly.”
Although state and federal transportation officials had been jointly studying the condition of Mississippi bridges since 2016, the issue grabbed headlines this past March when the Mississippi Department of Transportation demanded that 34 bridges in nine counties be closed immediately, even though some of them were from a previous list of bridges to be closed and had since been repaired. Eleven of those 34 bridges were in Jones County.
“Back in December is when we got the letters that I just showed you to repair . . . in fact it’s dated December 13. We’ve been getting them (letters) since this started. Half the bridges in Beat 3 were repaired, over half, pictures were taken of the repairs, even during the repairs, they were sent in, and because we didn’t keep those bridges closed all through the holidays, with them repaired, and let them come some four or five months later and inspect them, they closed them down again. That ain’t being fair.”
Saul’s claims are backed up by some correspondence recorded in Board minutes that date back to 2017. In a letter from the Jones County Board of Supervisors to MDOT dated December 18, 2017, the supervisors made a request to discover who will be performing bridge inspections in the county and making recommendations of bridge closures in the county. At the time of the 2017 letter, bridge inspectors with Garver LLC had been performing timber pile bridge inspections in Jones County and had recommended closing 19 bridges. From the tone of the letter, it seems that the Jones County supervisors had not even been given an introduction by MDOT to the company making decisions about bridge closures in the county. The last paragraph of the letter from the supervisors reads as follows:
“With this letter we are requesting that you setup a formal meeting with your contractor, Garver, LLC, and this Board at the most earliest of times to further discuss this important situation, present the critical findings and closure recommendations in person, and at that time make repair recommendations that would guarantee the re-opening of the structure(s) once complete.”
According to county officials, MDOT never responded to the letter.
In another letter, dated March 29, 2018, Nick Altobelli of Garver writes to officials at the Office of State Aid about bridges in Jones County and in the letter notes “of this refusal by Jones County to close these bridges based on Garver’s critical findings” and “I respectfully cannot agree to appear in front of the Jones County Board of Supervisors.”
The supervisors wanted to clarify what the critical findings of the bridges were and how repairs would have to be made to pass re-inspection. Garver refused to give them an audience at the time. Less than two weeks later the order from the governor was issued, shutting down bridges all across the state, including the ones in Jones County.
The counties had been threatened with loss of federal funding directly, Saul stated, but nearly 20 counties took the stance of not closing their bridges, since federal funding only comes to them about every 10 years. That’s apparently when the FHA conveyed their intention to withhold funding from MDOT, if the state agency didn’t coerce the counties to comply with closure requests.
“So that’s when the governor stepped in and declared a statewide emergency. That’s like calling for a natural disaster. That’s never been done before in the state of Mississippi against a local government, and it included all local governments that would not comply,” said Saul. “That was a failure in our leadership up there. They should have went to bat in Washington and showed them that we had differing opinions.”
Wiley Pickering, civil design manager for Chas. N. Clark Engineers LTD, a Laurel-based company that currently inspects “non-complex” bridge structures in Jones County, indicated in a meeting last week that the bridge issue didn’t just crop up over the past year or two. Pickering said he does not believe the supervisors have been negligent in how they have handled maintenance of bridges here at home.
“The need outweighs the funding. That’s how we got here,” he said. “It didn’t happen overnight. If there had been more money, more bridges would have been replaced. Jones County has been very good at using all the funds available. The only permanent solution is to replace the bridge on some of those structures. The bridge has a lifespan. You can go out there and do maintenance, patch it, but eventually it has to be replaced. That’s where we are.”
Pickering also explained that some inspection standards have been modified in the past few years, which has forced the closure of some bridges that might have been allowed to remain open in times past. CNC inspected all bridge structures in Jones County until 2017, but now, under new guidelines, they are presently contracted to only inspect non-complex bridges.
“Their (current MDOT contracted engineers) inspections reflect the same critical findings our inspections prior to them found. There’s no real discrepancies between the inspections we were doing and what they are doing, but the system has changed as to what is acceptable for a bridge to stay open,” he said.
Pickering also called “not true” the assumption by many people that money spent on bridges that were initially closed, repaired, reopened and then closed again was wasted money.
“That’s not true,” he asserted, explaining how initial repairs often fixed all the issues reported by the first group of inspectors, but that a new inspection crew, even if employed by the same company, might find another issue on their re-inspection and demand additional repairs. As an example, Pickering said an initial inspection crew may cite 20 of 28 pilings under a bridge that need repair. The county repairs the 20 pilings and prepares to reopen the bridge, but another group of inspectors come in and finds another piling that they believe “now” needs repairing. The bridge gets closed again.
“The money wasn’t wasted, but it’s a moving target,” added Pickering.
The engineer also pointed out that funding, or lack of, determines what action the supervisors take on a bridge, using “piles,” which are the supports under a bridge, as an example.
“Some piles don’t need to be spliced. They need to be replaced, but that’s a money issue,” he declared. “To go under a bridge and repair a section of a pile is much easier and less costly to do than to remove all decks, drive a new pile and reset the decks. We’re talking a difference of a few thousand dollars to a hundred thousand dollars.”
Governor Bryant called a special session last August so legislators could enact measures to increase funding for road and bridge projects. The Legislature passed a lottery bill, spelled out how some additional tax revenue would be appropriated toward roads and bridges (including new taxes on electric and hybrid vehicles), and allocated some of the BP oil settlement money to the counties.
Saul thinks those measures could have been accomplished years ago.
“They kicked the can down the road until it got serious last year, when a lot of state leaders wanted to go moving on up. That’s when they went to really running fast – did it in three days,” he said. “They divided the BP money, instituted a state lottery, instituted a tax on hybrid-electric vehicles, all in three days! We send them up there every year for over three months, and all of those years they couldn’t come to an agreement on how to help these rural county governments. But they did it in three days when it got time for them to be moving on up. That’s what ticks me off!”