NATCHEZ — After a long and stormy road, residents on Daisy Street will soon be getting the flood relief they have awaited for years.

The Daisy Street project will completely reconstruct 752 feet of the street, install curbs, gutters, inlets to collect storm water and underground pipes to discharge the water into the bayou.

The $370,000 project is being funded through an $185,000 grant from the Mississippi Development Authority’s Community Development Block Grant program. The grant is administered through the Southwest Mississippi Planning and Development District.

The city paid $150,000 in matching funds for the grant and $35,000 in engineering fees.

Natchez City Engineer David Gardner said the project has been a long time coming. The city’s initial grant application for the project was denied several years ago. The city did not receive the grant to fund the project until the fall of 2010.

Ward 1 Alderman James “Rickey” Gray, whose ward the project is in, expressed frustration to Gardner and SWMPDD planner Allen Laird at Tuesday’s aldermen meeting about the long wait for the start of the Daisy Street work.

Gardner has said he thought construction on Daisy Street would start last summer, but he said legal issues such as obtaining all the necessary rights-of-way from landowners slowed the project.

Gray said at the meeting he believed the lengthy project time is hindering the city’s ability to apply for more CDBG funding because the city must complete a CDBG project before applying for another grant.

“My point is we keep pushing CDBG back and back, (and we have) missed the opportunity (to apply for more grants),” Gray said. “I thought maybe we would have been able to apply for some more grants for this year.”

Ward 1 Alderwoman Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis said at the meeting that in the past she believed the city was receiving a CDBG grant almost every year.

“Now we are getting them every four to six years,” Mathis said. “These areas that are underserved are not being able to be addressed in a timely manner, and residents don’t understand why we can’t meet their needs in a timely manner.”

Laird said when Daisy Street is completed, the project will have taken approximately two years since the city received the grant. The two-year timeframe, he said, was standard for a project like Daisy Street, which required many preliminary approvals from the state and right-of-way acquisitions.

Laird said he would work with the aldermen to identify the next project for which they want to obtain a grant and begin preliminary work to get a jumpstart on next year’s grant applications. The applications are due each year in May.

Gardner said Thursday the city has been hard at work since it received the grant jumping through all the hoops required to get the project’s preliminary approvals and work done.

“There’s just a lot of work, a tremendous amount of work, that goes into a project that people have no clue about,” he said.

In addition to the drawn out and often difficult process of acquiring rights-of-way, Gardner said several state departments and organizations have to be notified of the project and given an opportunity to object.

The city, Gardner said, had to notify the Archives and History, Environment Quality, Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks and other departments, as well as a representative of the Choctaw Native American tribe.

The city also had to allow utility companies a few months to relocate utility lines, Gardner said, because of the extent of the project work.

Gardner said he shares Gray’s and Mathis’ frustration about the lengths the city has to go to get project construction under way.

“Their frustration is directed at the people who are equally as frustrated,” he said. “The frustration is in the state process you have to go through to get a project like this approved and ready for construction. It just takes a long time to get all that work done.”

Once the Daisy Street project is finished, Gardner said the residents on the street should get some much-needed relief from the standing water that accumulates in their yards after a hard rain.

“It should really help with the standing water,” he said. “(Residents) may still have some water collect because the street is on a high ridge, but this work is going to help them a lot.”

The Blaine Companies, the Mt. Olive construction company the city hired, was given a notice to proceed with work Tuesday. Gardner said the project is scheduled to wrap up in mid-August.