Cross your fingers. Belle Isle pedestrians may finally get their sidewalk back over the bridge to West Avenue and, more importantly, the work aimed at stopping the flooding of Island Avenue in front of the Grand Venetian condo may finally be completed.
A Miami Beach official says work on the troubled and long-delayed city effort to improve drainage on Belle Isle is about to resume.
At Wednesday’s meeting of the Venetian Island Homeowner Association, Miami Beach capital improvement project coordinator Roberto Rodriguez said all the permits and approvals are in place, and the city expects to be back on the job Monday. Completing the project is expected to take a month, he said.
City project manager Carla Dixon, who directly oversees the project, was not at the meeting.
Work on the project actually began Oct. 25, but stopped in early November after a construction crew excavated and began to remove and replace old drainage pipes where the bridge to Island View Park meets the Belle Isle seawall. Among the problems: workers found pilings for the bridge in unexpected locations, and engineering drawings had to be revised. Getting that through the byzantine county-city approval process took forever.
But now, Rodriguez said, the last hurdles have been cleared.
And, in other news, the Easter Bunny comes on Sunday.