FOLEY, Ala. — After two and a half years of assembling rights of way parcel by parcel, construction is set to begin on approximately 8,700 feet of new sidewalks and drainage improvements in Foley’s Mills Community.
The Foley City Council approved a bid from Trenchline Civil to build the sidewalks and complete the related drainage work. The project extends from the site of the new Mills Community Park, which is also under construction.
What Gets Built
The sidewalks will run along Mills Road, Little Rock Road, Airport Road, Dailey Lane and Baldwin County 65.
Mayor Ralph Hellmich said the city and community members have worked for several years to move the park and sidewalk projects forward, and described the goal in terms of connection rather than infrastructure.
“This is a project that will tie the Mills Community into the rest of Foley,” Hellmich said. “This will tie our community here into other areas of Foley with sidewalk and pedestrian ways to allow connectivity.”
Drainage Where There Has Never Been Any
The project also addresses drainage in portions of the community where drainage infrastructure has historically been limited — or absent.
“Some of the older areas of Foley just don’t have drainage,” Hellmich said. “That is a comprehensive sidewalk drainage project where there has not been drainage before.”
That combination is deliberate and efficient. Building a sidewalk requires opening the ground along a roadway edge, which is precisely where a drainage system would go. Doing both in one project avoids tearing up the same corridor twice, and it means a new sidewalk does not end up obstructing the path water needs to take.
The underlying condition is common in older Southern communities. Areas that developed before modern stormwater standards frequently rely on roadside ditches, natural drainage or nothing at all. In the Gulf Coast rainfall regime, where individual storms can drop several inches in an hour, the difference between a functioning drainage system and none at all shows up in standing water, saturated yards and roads that flood in ordinary weather.
The Rights-of-Way Problem
The mayor identified the project’s central difficulty, and it was not engineering.
“It was a challenging project from the standpoint of lack of rights of way,” Hellmich said. “Working with the Mills Community Action Group over the last two-and-a-half years, we’ve acquired all that.”
Right of way is the strip of land a public entity must control in order to build within it. In older areas, existing rights of way are frequently too narrow for a sidewalk, which means the city must obtain additional land or easements from adjoining property owners.
That is a negotiation repeated with every affected parcel along 8,700 feet of roadway, and a single holdout can force a redesign or stop a segment entirely. Two and a half years of work by the Mills Community Action Group to assemble the necessary rights of way is the reason this project reached the bidding stage at all.
It also illustrates something about how infrastructure gets built in established neighborhoods: the constraint is rarely money or design. It is land.
The Bid Came in Well Under Estimate
Trenchline Civil submitted the lowest of nine bids received, at approximately $1.62 million — well below the city’s engineering estimate of $2.37 million.
The gap is substantial: roughly $750,000, or about 32% under estimate.
Nine bidders on a municipal project of this size indicates a competitive market, and competition tends to drive bids downward. Engineering estimates are also prepared conservatively, since a project that comes in over estimate creates a funding problem while one that comes in under does not.
For the city, the practical effect is that money budgeted for this project remains available for other work.
Timeline
Construction is expected to begin within a month. The contractor will have 200 calendar days to complete the project.
Two hundred calendar days from a start in mid-to-late October points toward completion in the spring. Calendar-day contracts include weekends and holidays, and weather delays on an outdoor project of this kind are absorbed within that window rather than added to it — which is part of why the duration is generous relative to the work.
Sidewalks as Infrastructure
Sidewalk projects are easy to undervalue against larger capital work, but their effect on daily life in a neighborhood is direct.
Where there is no sidewalk, people walk in the road. Children going to a bus stop, residents walking to a store, anyone without access to a vehicle — all of them share pavement with traffic. Building a separated walking surface removes that conflict.
The connection to the new Mills Community Park is the piece that makes the network functional rather than decorative. A park reachable only by car serves a narrower population than one residents can walk to, and pairing the park’s construction with the sidewalk that reaches it means both open into a working system.
The Mills Community
The Mills Community is one of Foley’s established neighborhoods, and the two-and-a-half-year effort by the Mills Community Action Group to assemble rights of way reflects organized local involvement over a sustained period.
Foley has grown substantially as part of Baldwin County’s broader expansion, and investment in older established areas rather than exclusively in new development is a recurring question for growing cities. This project represents that kind of investment: sidewalks and drainage in a neighborhood that has done without both.