A connector road linking North Frontage Road with Wisconsin Avenue has moved closer to reality.

The Board of Mayor and Aldermen Monday authorized City Clerk Walter Osborne to advertise for bids to build the road, which will link the two roads and provide an alternate route for workers with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center trying to either get home or to work.

“This will help economic development because we have a new car dealership opening on the road and we have the other (open) property,” Mayor George Flaggs Jr. said. “This will also reduce traffic (on Halls Ferry Road), because the people at ERDC will be able to use that road North Frontage Road. They’ll be able to avoid three (traffic) lights.”

The city has a low-interest, $1.3 million CAP loan to build the road, which will cross the remainder of the old Battlefield Mall property now owned by JEBCO LLC, the parent company for Blackburn Motors. It will run between the River Hills Bank property and the proposed site for the Cannon Honda and Cannon Toyota dealerships to be built west of the bank.

Right of way negotiations with the bank over repairs to potential damage to its parking lot caused by the roadwork delayed the project by preventing the city from getting a permit from the Mississippi Department of Transportation.

The city and the bank reached an agreement in November where the city will pay the bank an estimated $68,215.37 to repair the damage to the bank’s parking lot and entrance caused by the construction. MDOT has issued the city’s permit Jan. 25.

A decision by the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission in November 2013 approved rezoning the 22-acre tract along North Frontage owned by JEBCO LLC from C-4 commercial to planned use development, opening the way for the road. A planned use development, or PUD, designation allows light industrial operations, and cleared the way for the city to apply for the MDA loan.