T-L Photo/GAGE VOTA This road slip at the intersection of Spring Hill Road and Hospital Road in Bellaire is slated to be repaired in the coming weeks.

BELLAIRE — Bids are officially open for the slip repair at the intersection of Spring Hill Road and Hospital Road in Bellaire.

The project is to repair a 150-foot long wall at the intersection of Riverview Heights Road.

“Last year we recognized that we had a problem,” Belmont County Engineer Terry Lively said. “We’ve got a slip at the intersection of Spring Hill and Hospital Road. We knew we needed to get that slip fixed and we knew that there were a couple of big waterlines in the area, a 24-inch and a 12-inch line. So we talked to the water department about it, and they thought they knew where the one line was and they weren’t quite sure about the other one.”

Lively added that the Belmont County Water & Sewer District wasn’t sure about where the line was at first because the line is made of cement so you can’t detect the lines with a metal detector, but crews have already replaced and moved the lines to accommodate the project.

During the slip repair, the road will have to be closed due to it being too narrow for traffic to safely move around the construction site.

Lively said if you are located on the Bellaire side of the slip, you will have to go down the hill into the village of Bellaire; if you are on the Belmont County Road 214 side, you will have to go through County Road 214 or Indian Run Road. Although it will be inconvenient for residents who use the road, Lively believes that the project will be completed fairly quickly.

“I’m thinking this is like a six- to eight-week project,” he added. “Especially with the road being closed, they won’t have to deal with traffic. But that’s not why we did it. There’s just not physically enough room to get traffic around.”

Belmont County Commissioner Jerry Echemann discussed how the work will be funded.

“Part of this project is from an Ohio Public Works Commission grant of $400,000, and it is apparently a two-part project so the actual paving is for next year,” Echemann said.

The project being broken into two separate projects prioritizes securing the slip by reinforcing the wall before the winter months. After the slip repair is completed, the Belmont County commissioners will accept bids for a paving project that will stretch from the Bellaire corporation limit to County Road 214.

“It’s a good size project, and we just made the cut for getting this project funded. As a matter of fact, we wouldn’t have been able to do it without the help of the commissioner’s office,” Lively said.

Along with the $400,000 Ohio Public Works Grant, the rest of the project was going to be funded by a local match from the Motor Vehicle Gas Tax Funds as well as a loan provided by Ohio Public Works. According to Lively, OPWC contacted him and said it was still able to provide the grant but ran out of loan funds.

“So I talked to the commissioners and I said, ‘Look, I don’t have an extra $318,000 laying around, can you cover that part of it and we can get the grant and build the project?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that,’ which was very generous of them to step in and do that,” Lively added. “We’re getting the contracts together now, and as soon as we can get that up and running we’ll get the contractor working on it.”

The first bid on the project was from Litman Excavating from New Martinsville, which presented a bid of $360,652. The second bid was from Ohio-West Virginia Excavating from Powhatan Point at $283,158. Allen Stone Co. from Vincent, Ohio, presented the final bid. That bid was for $311,857.

Following the bid submissions to the Belmont County Board of Commissioners, the bids were turned over to Lively who will review them and give the commissioners his recommendation of which bid should be accepted. Lively estimated the project will cost $360,000.