A contract to jump-start a quest to clean bayous inside Vicksburg could be secured by Warren County by year’s end, but only if owners of properties near the narrow ditches allow access to their yards.

No work has taken place on the endeavor since a 1,000-foot blanket of rocks was put in place at Hutson Street and Round Alley in the Kings community. Warren County officials chose the site to test the viability of strengthening the walls of Glass, Stouts and Hatcher bayous instead of physically clearing them.

In 2008, supervisors were awarded $3.9 million in Katrina-related disaster grant money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development after a general outline of the project was submitted. Engineering and surveying fees paid from the grant funds this year have totaled $137,171.05. Another $37,812.49 in administration fees been paid.

Reinforcements to a drainage canal near a bridge at Spouts Spring Road, a last-minute addition to the project, is the next phase but has stalled due to various legal and construction hurdles. Plans there had to be redesigned when the bayou endeavor overlapped with an anti-erosion project the City of Vicksburg had begun, work that wrapped up by early September.

Multiple heirs to parcels in the area involved talks on 12 easements, a final hurdle to bidding out the job. Completion of the city’s project has freed up five potential signatures to enable access, according to Jimmy G. Gouras Urban Planning Consultants, administrator of the grant funds.

Sections of Stouts Bayou along Lane and Crawford streets, where easements have been drawn, are to follow once a Spouts Spring contract is done, said Brian Robbins of ABMB Engineers, the county’s engineer of record and engineer on the bayou-cleaning effort. Specifics of the grant call for the county to maintain the areas inside the work zones perpetually.

District 3 Supervisor Charles Selmon, who pushed the hardest of the five county board members to tie the effort to the Katrina money, acknowledged the process is arduous but offered to “lead the way” in getting landowners’ permission.

Board President Richard George said the papers “are in the hands of the grant administrator” and the county has dismissed buying out any property by any means.

“We’re not buying and we’re not doing eminent domain,” George said.

Funds were awarded as part of a $5.48 billion recovery package awarded to Mississippi from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development via the Mississippi Development Authority. Eligible counties included 49 declared federal disaster areas following Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Vicksburg and Warren County were awarded more than $5.2 million for the bayou work and for a new fire station at Vicksburg Municipal Airport, where interior touch-ups should be done by mid-November, airport manger Curt Follmer said. A $320,000 slice of the city’s cut also financed a 10-bay hangar at the facility, which opened in July.