Construction of a new sidewalk along South Morris Street will soon be underway.

At the March 23 Mexico City Council meeting, council members approved a resolution allowing City Manager Bruce Slagle to sign an agreement with Engineering Surveys & Services for Phase 4 of the Mexico Sidewalk Improvement project.

The improvement plan includes the construction of approximately 2,500 feet of sidewalk along the west side of South Morris Street from West Boulevard to Lakeview Road.

“When you’re looking at the downtown area and connecting that all the way down to the commercial district, we’ll call it down around the Aldi and the cinema in that area, this is one key missing area,” Drew Williford, City of Mexico public works director, said.

In 2025, the city received a $345,865 grant from the MoDOT Transportation Alternatives Program for Mexico Sidewalk Improvement Phase IV. The TAP grant is aimed at transportation projects emphasizing bicycle and pedestrian facilities. The grant offers a cost reimbursement rate of 80-20, so the city will be responsible for 20% of the total project cost, which is anticipated to be $432,000, according to Williford.

“The 2025 budget does include $405,584 to support, in essence, all the TAP grants that we have — Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 and what we would call Phase 4 here — so sufficient funding does exist,” he said.

The first three TAP grants that the City of Mexico received concerned sidewalk improvements along Muldrow Street. The grant for phase one was awarded in 2018. The project cost $169,432, and the city was reimbursed $127,074. Phase two, awarded in 2022, cost $241,786, and the city received $193,428 in grant funding. In 2024, the city received its final grant for phase three of Muldrow Street sidewalk improvements. The project cost $371,066, and the city received $296,853.

But Williford said public works has been hearing about the need for sidewalks along Morris Street, so this phase of sidewalk construction will focus on the area near Mexico Middle School and the Mexico Area Family YMCA.

Williford explained that after the grant is awarded for each project, the city goes through a series of steps to select a consultant using the MoDOT Consultant On-Call list. For this project, as well as the ongoing phase three projects, the city selected Engineering Surveys & Services, of Columbia.

“We don’t have sufficient staff or time to do the engineering and, in essence, comply with all the grant requirements, and there are many, in-house,” Williford said.

The total project cost estimate provided by Engineering Surveys & Services is $100,108.67 — the maximum not to exceed $86,411.21 for preliminary engineering and $13,697.46 for construction engineering.