Crews may start work on the Old Augusta Road project by the middle of this week, Effingham County commissioners and staff learned.

Jerry Brinson of Moreland Altobelli Associates discussed Old Augusta Road plans with county officials and state Department of Transportation officials, including retiring commissioner Harold Linnenkohl.

“We want to build this all as one project,” Brinson said. “We’ve finished the survey on it. We’re getting into design now.”

The road will be a two-lane road, though the county has right-of-way for a four-lane road. Cost of the road work is expected to top $7 million and there may not be much state aid coming, Linnenkohl lamented.

“There’s nowhere near that much available in state aid,” he said.

“Costs have gone up so fast, so rapidly,” county commission Chairperson Verna Phillips said. “It’s certainly a lot more expensive than we had anticipated.”

R.B. Baker Construction was awarded the bid for paving 2.75 miles of Old Augusta Road South. That section of the project is 3.1 miles long.

Phillips said the county has looked  at the possibility of state help.

“If there was another possibility, we would look at it,” she said.

Linnenkohl said that in order to get federal aid for the road, it would need a logical terminus. He praised county commissioners for sticking with their Old Augusta Road plans, an idea that began while his predecessor Wayne Shackelford was in office.

“We’re doing this one step at a time, one dollar at a time,” Phillips said. “We understand we have to do it in multiple years and multiple phases.”