EDWARDSBURG — On Monday, construction began on US-12 just outside of Edwardsburg Public Schools. There are thick and tall orange and white striped cones scattered on the road, as well as several on the yards adjacent to the construction.

For now, vehicles are unable to enter the driveway for the Edwardsburg Intermediate School or the administrative office. Instead, drivers must go down to Section Street, enter the lot next to the elementary school and go through the bus parking lot.

Specific construction zones will be changed throughout the project, which is expected to run through Oct. 5. While this will interfere to a degree with school traffic, Jim Knoll, the superintendent elect, said it will be worth it in long run.

“It was so bad you don’t know where they were fixing the road and where it was a pothole,” Knoll said with a chuckle.

The roughly $1.5 million road reconstruction project will fix many of the issues to the road that drivers have struggled with for years. But at a meeting on Monday, June 11, with the Michigan Department of Transportation, many residents were unhappy that some additional changes to the road were not being addressed, like adding more sidewalks and even bike lanes.

“There is no bike bath,” said Jim Woods with MDOT during the meeting. “There is not a huge area of sidewalk replacement. It’s more if there are broken pieces or for the ramps or areas near the curbs. I don’t know who puts in the money to take care of a bike path or sidewalks, but it was not there during the design.”

Nick Schirripa, MDOT’s communication representative for southwest Michigan, further elaborated on this issue.

“It sounds like we have not done a decent job of communicating this effectively,” Schirripa said. “A few years ago, when we started designing this, our designer spoke with the village. They only requested a few sidewalk repairs in a few spots.”

The area of land that is being constructed lies within in the Village of Edwardsburg, and any road or streetscape projects that were planned after the design and sculpting portion of the process was complete needed to be funded by village officials.

“Once we had a design planned and that funding amount locked in, if we would have added anything after that we wouldn’t have been able to do that in that process,” Schirripa said. “[Anything that] the Village or township wanted to fund we could have maybe done it in conjunction with this project timing wise so it was less of an intrusion. But we had already had the funding locked in for a very defined design project.”

However, the village does work to maintain its sidewalks, and according to President Scott Mackling, most of the village already has sidewalks. There are just a few areas that do not.

“It’s a state project, so we are not involved,” Mackling said. “Anything the village does would be any sidewalks outside of that project and we do that stuff anyway. We’ve had input into how the curbing is going to go and some aspects.”