CRESTVIEW — There’s good news in the gully for residents who live off Oak Hill Road.
Okaloosa County has at last received Federal Emergency Management Agency funding to fix a washout that has severed access between Old Bethel Road and the Lake Silver area since April 2014.
Advertising for bids to mitigate the washout through totally redesigning the structure over Davis Mill Creek began Monday, Okaloosa County Public Works Director Jason Autrey said.
“It’s not just repairing the road,” he said. “It’s putting in a mitigation effort that will minimize the chance of anything like that happening in the future.”
The FEMA disaster relief award was considerably larger than what the federal agency originally offered, Autrey said.
“Initially, FEMA wanted to give us $60,000,” Autrey said. “We kinda dug our heels in and now we have $572,000 to do the project right. We saved our taxpayers a half a million dollars. I think that’s worth it.”
Autrey said the county shares residents’ frustration with the federal agency’s slow pace.
“I don’t like that it took that long,” he said. “It moved at the pace of FEMA, but at the end of the day, we got what it needed to have.”
The county is expecting to receive contractors’ bids by March 9. Finalizing construction contracts will take between a month and a month and a half after that, Autrey said.
“You should see workers out there pretty quickly,” he said. “Nobody wants that road opened more than I do, other than the people that live there.
"This is one project I’ll be glad to see become a memory.”
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: FEMA awards major reconstruction funding for Oak Hill Road