County Line Road Overpass Contract Awarded to Hitchcock Design Group

A $258,570 contract for landscape and engineering services has been awarded to Hitchcock Design Group. The contract is part of a $1.8 million dollar project to resurface the County Line Road overpass in order to beautify and brand the overpass.

Hitchcock Design Group will work with civil engineers,  geotech engineers and lighting specialists, among others, to complete construction documents for the Illinois Department of Transportation. The documents will be used by construction companies to bid to work on the bridge reconstruction project.

Among the improvements is a plan to resurface the bridge in steel and brand it with Burr Ridge's logo of the village's initials and signature leaf. The emblem will be on both sides of the County Line Road overpass and visible to traffic traveling north and south on I-55. 

In addition to modernizing the bridge's appearance, resurfacing the bridge in steel  is expected to prolong its use.

"We're getting, in essence, a brand new bridge," said Mayor Gary Grasso at Monday night's board meeting.

The project was made possible by a grant through the Illinois Transportation Enhancement Program Grant, which the village applied for last August. You can read more about the grant here.

The village was told that it would receive $1,447,470 in grant money for County Line Road/I-55 interchange improvements, which is projected to cover 80 percent of the total cost of improvements. The rest of the money for the project will come from the village's hotel/motel tax fund.

"As mayor I would have looked for a way to fund this even if we had not received the grant," said Grasso about the Gateway project in November. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Burr Ridge Village Administrator Steve Stricker said that construction is scheduled to begin in 2012.

This article has been updated. An earlier version of this article did not include the words "landscape and engineering services in the first paragraph. That description and the second paragraph was later added in order to clarify the role of Hitchcock Design Group in the project.