Florida Street Project Getting Messy

An over three-million dollar drainage project has closed off part of Florida Street from Airport to Emogene since October.
Since then business owners say the project has drained their revenue, so they are pursing legal action.

Eleven business owners in the area filed a joint lawsuit against the City of Mobile and Volkert Construction Services on two counts of Trepass and Nuisance. "It's just really difficult for not only the business owners to make it to their businesses and conduct their business, but it's virtually impossible for the customers to be able to make it," Says Chase Dearman, Attorney.
Eileen Schwarz owns 'Knot Just Beads' and says, "Our revenues are down are sales are down and yet we've incurred a lot more advertising expenses."
Schwarz says she's tried to advertise more, after several people thought her shop was closed because of the construction.
City officials say they regret the inconvenience but the project is long overdue. "It's a great drainage problem over there, there's a lot of flooding that goes on over there and there's a lot of residence that have also complained to us to fix the problem, "Says Barbara Drummond, a spokeswoman for the City of Mobile.
Drummond declined to comment on the lawsuit, but says the construction is only in phase one, of a two part project. Meantime they are doing the best they can to get the job done."We've had people out there from our traffic engineers to our engineers looking at how can we give them more access, we want to get the project completed as well,"Says Drummond.

The city initially set February 29th as the completion date for the drainage project. The estimate for completion has since been delayed until mid March.
The second phase of the project along Florida Street will be between Dauphin Street and Old Shell Road. No word yet on when that will begin.

To view the lawsuit click on the link to the right of this page.