Planners Speed Up Milton-Madison Bridge Project

by Stephanie CrosbyThe entities working on replacing most of the bridge between Madison, Indiana and Milton, Kentucky are speeding up the process. Today they announced the release of what’s called a design-build contract.Tim Sorenson is the Deputy Project Manager with the firm that has been handling the bridge design so far. He says they’ve done about thirty-percent of the planning.Now, they’re going to pass that on to potential bidders to construct the bridge. He says a design-build contract allows a contractor to complete the design phase during construction, which speeds the process up considerably.“The environmental process was supposed to take four or five years when we started three years ago," says Sorenson, "and now in five years, we’re going to have a new bridge in place.”Sorenson says the timeline needed to be truncated to use 20-million dollars in stimulus funds allocated for the project.He says they hope to select a contractor in September and start construction soon after.