To the long list of issues and problems that have caused delays to projects along the Wabash River can be added one more, although this latest entrant is one everyone should have seen coming.
Wabash River levee superintendent Hunter Pinnell on Thursday delivered some not-so-great news to members of the city's Redevelopment Commission regarding the project on the grounds of the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park.
It's going to take even longer and likely cost more, due, in part, to other delays pushing the timeline of the work into the period when federal regulations prohibit disturbing the endangered Indiana bat.
The bat hibernates in caves during the winter, but emerges in the warmer months. Their favorite places to nest are in trees — either in the branches or even behind the bark — located in clusters along a river bank.
Federal regulations stipulate that the bats aren't to be disturbed between April 1 and Oct. 1, their mating season.
Pinnell said some trees will need to be removed from the park grounds as part of a project to comply with federal levee standards, the very trees the bats are probably nesting in.
“So that means there just isn't time to do it this year. We're going to have to delay the start to 2017 now.
“There is just nothing else we can do,” he said.
Nearly a year ago, an effort to raise the park’s south lawn to comply with new levee standards set forth by the Federal Emergency Management Agency hit a snag with the discovery that an 80-year-old, still functioning copper underground sprinkler system was more extensive than originally thought.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers won’t allow a sprinkler system so close to the levee, so that portion of the system will have to be removed and the infrastructure redesigned and modified to continue reaching the areas of grass it needs to.
With the project already three years in the making, crews with Kerns Excavating of Bicknell kept working where they could while the city reached an agreement satisfactory to the National Parks Service so the lawn could be raised and the levee improved.
A 40-foot section of grass, however, has yet to be raised and Pinnell said Thursday they are inching ever closer to a solution, but it will likely cost the RDC more money.
The federal government is requiring the use of a special kind of fill dirt in that 40-foot section, Pinnell said, and Kerns is currently trying to figure out where to get it.
“I don't have a price yet, but it's safe to say it's going to be more expensive,” he said.
The original project was expected to cost about $100,000, but the first phase came in under budget. Pinnell said he doesn't yet have any estimated costs on the redesign.
“But I'll be back when I do,” he told the group.
In March, officials with the Indiana Department of Transportation announced that the 6-month closure of the Lincoln Memorial Bridge, too, would be postponed until fall due to the Indiana bat.
The bats nest in cracks underneath bridge.
The bridge project was suppose to get started last fall but was delayed until spring. Then INDOT officials discovered a larger than expected colony of Indiana bats living beneath the bridge.
INDOT officials said they still hope to complete the project by year's end, which will mean a shorter bridge closure.
That project has also delayed another being paid for by the RDC, the construction of Levee Street. That road will extend from Kimmell Park to the GRC park on the “wet” side of the levee. It was initially meant to exist just as a utility road, but RDC members and Pinnell agreed to pour a surface that would be both pedestrian and bicycle friendly as well.
A gravel road currently exists, but it doesn't yet connect with the park, and Pinnell said work won't resume until the bridge project is finished.
Vincennes University took over Kimmell Park from the city in the spring to give it a much-needed $2.5 million facelift.
VU officials took out hundreds of trees along Levee Street to create a nicer view, undertaking the work before the federal regulations protecting the bats took effect.