Crews with the Mississippi Department of Transportation have been working this week to replace a sidewalk and install handicap access ramps at the intersection of North First Street and East Court Street.

     City Public Works Director Steve Moreton hopes the work will finish in the next two or three weeks.

     The sidewalk work comes after the completion of overlay work on parts of First Street from Court to Enterprise streets. The overlay was completed approximately two weeks ago, Moreton said.

     “That was a bad section of street,” Moreton said. “Now it ties in downtown up to the Industrial Park.”

     The project has been funded primarily by federal stimulus money left over from a partial overlay of Brookway Boulevard, Moreton said.

     The money remaining wasn’t enough to complete Brookway Boulevard, and the city faced a “use it or lose it” scenario, the public works director said.

     “It wasn’t enough to do Brookway from (Highway) 51 to Piggly Wiggly,” Moreton said.

     The leftover funds put into the First Street project totaled about $185,000 to $200,000, Moreton said. However, Moreton added, the remaining money could only be used for certain kinds of projects, giving the city limited options.

     At the First Street and Court Street intersection, ramps are being added at each corner, making the sidewalks handicapped accessible.

     There will be two ramps at each corner on the intersection, for a total of eight ramps. This required renovations to the existing sidewalks.

     “MDOT requires a wider sidewalk than most,” Moreton said.

     On one side of the street, Moreton said MDOT crews completely removed and replaced a sidewalk.

     The stimulus funds come in the form of a matching grant Moreton believed required the city to supply 25 percent of the funds. The city’s matching funds are coming from the general budget, Moreton said.

     All the remaining stimulus funds are budgeted for the First Street project.

     On a related note, city aldermen will soon be discussing future paving projects in greater detail. In recent meetings, aldermen have briefly discussed the need to discuss the allocation of paving funds, and there have been hints that the controversies of last year over fund allocations may resurface.