You Paid For It: Construction to start soon on new pedestrian bridge in McClellanville

MCCLELLANVILLE, S.C. (WCSC) - Construction for a new pedestrian bridge in McClellanville will finally be underway in the next couple of months.

The project was first proposed eight years ago but officials say things like budget and construction haven’t added up.

Officials over this project say they’re hoping to break ground sometime in January on the new pedestrian bridge and folks in the area say it’s a long time coming. The whole idea behind this pedestrian bridge is connectivity.

“We’ve got it drawn and engineered and have put it out to bid three times,” Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments Planning Director Kathryn Basha says. “The first time we put it out to bid was at the height of the market so the costs were prohibitive for us to actually build the project. The second time we put it out, just recently this year, the prices have gone down but we had some issues meeting all of the federal regulations on those bids. We just recently got into a new set of bids and it looks like we’re going to be able to get it constructed at the beginning of this coming year.”

For perspective, this new 210-foot-long pedestrian bridge is going to be off of South Pinckney Street about a quarter of a mile back from Highway 17. When taking a walk down Pinckney Street, toward Old Cemetery Road, the sidewalk ends.

“You have to almost go in the street or go down into kind of a boggy area in order to go around the bend and across the creek into the school site,” Basha explains. “So kids who are riding their bicycles from one side of the village to the other, people who just want to walk from one side of the village to the other are basically walking around a blind curve in order to get there.”

This area is right at the Cape Romain Environmental Education Charter School.

Basha says McClellanville is very much a walking and biking town, so this new construction will help with safety while also bridging the gap between two sides of town.

“It will provide that connectivity that everybody would like to have so that the two sides of the village aren’t separated by the creek,” Basha says.

Overall – officials say the project will cost about $900,000. Funding includes:

• Transportation Enhancement Grant from SCDOT - $400,000
• Charleston County CTC - $200,000
• Charleston County Transportation Sales Tax program - $200,000
• SC Park and Recreational Trail program - $100,000

Basha says the bids have come in and The South Carolina Department of Transportation is going through their bid analysis.

“We’re hoping in the next couple of weeks to be able to award a contract to the successful bidder,” Basha says. “That’s when we will schedule a construction conference and groundbreaking and get them mobilized.”

Basha adds that once construction actually starts it will only take about four months to complete.

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