Last week the Bulloch County commissioners quietly approved contracts totaling about $3.47 million for construction of bridges on road segments that have been closed for more than a year, on Cypress Lake Road and G.W. Oliver Road.
Both contract recommendations were included in the commissioners’ “consent agenda” during the Tuesday, Aug. 4, regular meeting and approved along with 15 other “consent” items by a single motion and 5-0 vote. Although the bridge contracts were not discussed specifically, the County Engineering Office’s recommendations, the bid lists and hundreds of pages of supporting documents were included in the agenda packets.
“We anticipate both bridge structures being completed and the roads reopened Fall of next year, weather permitting,” stated an announcement posted by county staff on the Board of Commissioners’ Facebook page the next day.
On Cypress Lake Road, the new bridge will be a replacement of the more than 50-year-old bridge that has been closed since a vehicle – reportedly a stolen truck, which was then abandoned – crashed into it and damaged a primary support beam on Feb. 25, 2025.
The commissioners awarded Southeastern Site Development the construction contract for this bridge project at a price of $1,876,727 (all costs rounded to dollars). That was the lowest of six bids received by the county, with the other five companies’ offers ranging from a little over $1.9 million to $4.25 million.
Southeastern Site Development’s winning bid was also 12.6% lower than the “engineer’s opinion of probable construction cost” calculated by Health & Lineback, according to the county engineer’s report. In a separate part of the overall project cost, Heath & Lineback had been awarded a $378,300 design contract for the project back on April 15, 2025. The old bridge, which crosses a creek called Dry Branch, was previously posted with an eight-ton weight limit, and the new one is designed not to have such a restriction.
Because the Cypress Lake Road bridge closure was attributed to an accident and not storm damage, the project was not eligible for funding by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or its Georgia counterpart, GEMA. Instead, the county is using a $2,247,332 Local Road Assistance grant, awarded by the Georgia Department of Transportation in a “supplemental” round of funding through the annual Local Maintenance and Improvement Grants, or LMIG, program.
G.W. Oliver Road
However, the construction of a new bridge on G.W. Oliver Road will be paid for with a combination of federal FEMA reimbursement, a smaller share in state GEMA money and county T-SPLOST, or Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax revenue.
This project qualified for FEMA disaster mitigation funding because the damage, to what was previously a culvert system instead of a bridge, was caused by floodwaters from Tropical Storm Debby in early August 2024 and two subsequent events. First closed to traffic that Aug. 4, the paved road section was temporarily reopened but further undermined by heavy rain Nov. 7-8, 2024, and closed again, only to be eroded still more by another heavy rainfall event in May 2025.
The construction contract, which includes removing the remains of the seven, multi-segment 84-by-60-inch concrete culvert pipes and building an all-new bridge, was awarded to Gregory Bridge Company last week at a price of $1,589,926. This was also the lowest of six bids received from as many companies, with the other offers ranging from $1.62 million up to $3.22 million.
Gregory Bridge Company’s winning bid was reportedly 31.4% below the engineer’s opinion estimate prepared by the engineering design firm Kimley-Horn and Associates. Kimley-Horn had been awarded the $424,500 design and engineering services contract for the project on July 1, 2025.
The two projects, now getting underway at roughly the same time and both expected to take about a year to complete, are similar in some ways but different in others, County Engineer Ron Nelson said in a May interview.
"We are literally on the same schedule: June construction letting … then an August kickoff for construction," he said, "and the two bridges are very, very similar in size; their spans are very, very similar. So they share a lot of similarities."
He had also predicted “July approval and execution by the board,” but that occurred four days into August.
Yet the bridges, designed by two different engineering firms, won't be exactly the same, having different substructures, he noted. Funding is also from entirely different sources.
As previously reported, one complication in preparing for the Cypress Lake bridge replacement was the county’s need to obtain additional right of way. On G.W. Oliver Road, property owners had donated all the required right of way, Nelson had said.
But at the Cypress Lake site, according to the project summary, “Condemnation proceedings were necessary for two of the four affected parcels. The County has taken possession of one condemned parcel, while acquisition of the remaining parcel remains in progress.”
“Condemnation” refers to a legal process in which owners are compensated for a forced sale to the county at a potentially court-determined price.