"We've had funding, it's been taken away, we've had funding, it's been taken away. The city is very pleased that it's moving forward."

That's Ferrysburg City Manager Craig Bessinger this spring, describing a bridge project that has now outlasted three mayors, two failed funding rounds, and a millage vote residents rejected by nearly two to one. If you live near Ferrysburg and drive West Spring Lake Road, you've probably heard some version of "Smith's Bridge is finally getting fixed" more than once over the past decade. This time the money actually cleared. What hasn't fully landed yet, for most people who use that bridge every day, is what a fully funded fix actually costs in time: a six-month stretch with no bridge at all.

Seven Years of Almosts

The bridge that carries West Spring Lake Road over Smith's Bayou has been a problem since at least 2016, when the city submitted its first grant application to MDOT's Local Bridge Program and got turned down because Ferrysburg was asking for a quarter of the program's entire statewide funding pool. A 2017 millage request to self-fund the repairs failed 607 to 355. By April 2018, inspectors were reporting that deck deterioration was accelerating. In June 2019, the City Council voted unanimously to close the bridge to vehicle traffic entirely, citing box beams too thin to trust.

That closure hit hard. Roughly 6,000 vehicles a day used to cross that span, and Ferrysburg Fire Chief Michael Olthof told WOOD TV at the time that the detour would add three to six minutes to emergency response, in a fire that doubles in size every minute it burns. A second engineering opinion, paid for in part by a resident who owned a summer home nearby, eventually persuaded the council to reopen the bridge to lighter vehicles with a weight restriction in January 2020, a limit that is still in effect today.

Then came the funding whiplash. In 2023, the city learned that roughly $9.92 million it had been counting on through MDOT's bridge bundling program, money sourced from COVID-era federal relief, had to be returned because of a clawback clause nobody had flagged. City Manager Bessinger described a room full of officials who had been meeting about utility logistics the week before, fully expecting to break ground.

What Changed in April 2026

The reversal came in November 2024, when U.S. Representative Hillary Scholten announced an $11.7 million federal grant for what her office calls the Smith's Bayou Bridge, the largest single award out of a $34.2 million pool distributed to Michigan and the only West Michigan project to receive funding from it, according to her office's release. That grant sat as a commitment for over a year while the city worked out the actual construction agreement with MDOT.

That agreement became real in April 2026, when Ferrysburg's City Council formally approved it, bringing the total project cost to $14.4 million. This is the detail that matters more than the dollar figure: for the first time since 2019, "funded" now comes attached to a construction plan, not just a press release. According to Fox 17's reporting on the council vote, the project will close the bridge entirely for six months while crews replace the superstructure, widen the sidewalks, and remove some trees along the approach. As of that April vote, the city had not yet awarded a contractor, which means the six-month clock had not started.

If the past decade of grant applications, clawbacks, and re-applications has taught residents anything, it's that a funded plan and an actual start date are two different milestones. Anyone who wants to know when the detour begins should watch the city's own news page rather than assume construction is already underway just because council approved the agreement months ago.

The Parking Lot Nobody Agreed On

Buried inside that six-month plan is a smaller fight that says a lot about how a project like this actually plays out on the ground. The reconstruction calls for relocating the bridge's parking area from the west side of West Spring Lake Road to the east side, a change MDOT wants because the current lot forces pedestrians to cross the road to reach the walking path.

Residents near the bridge, in the Veits Landing area, aren't fully on board. Board members Stanley Sterk and Charles Farkas raised concerns to Fox 17 about moving parking to a spot where construction work could damage the root systems of mature trees lining the pathway. Sterk's question was blunt: the parking is already on the west side, why move it. Bessinger's response was that once a contractor is under contract, the city intends to work with them to shift the lot back to the west side after all, which suggests the final layout wasn't locked in even after council approval.

That's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that only matters if you actually live within a few blocks of the bridge. It also means the exact footprint of construction, including how many trees come down, may still shift depending on how those conversations with the contractor go.

What Six Months Without the Bridge Actually Means

Strip away the funding history and here's the plain version of what changes once construction starts:

• The bridge closes to all vehicle traffic for approximately six months while the superstructure is replaced
• Sidewalks along the span will be widened as part of the same project
• Some trees near the approach are expected to come down, with the exact number still not finalized as of the April 2026 vote
• The parking area serving the bridge will move, most likely settling back on the west side after community pushback
• The load restriction that's been in place since January 2020 stays in effect until the new structure is complete

None of this is new information for the households who've lived through the 2019 closure once already. What is new is that this time the closure is planned rather than emergency, which in theory gives residents and emergency services more lead time to plan detours than they got in 2019, when barricades went up as soon as signage was ready.

Why the History Actually Matters Here

The easy version of this story is "good news, the bridge is finally getting fixed." The version that's actually useful if you live in Ferrysburg is that funding secured and construction started are not the same event, and this project's own history shows how much can shift between those two points. A grant can get clawed back. A parking plan can get renegotiated after a public comment period. A contractor hasn't even been selected as of the most recent reporting.

If you're someone who plans routes around Smith's Bayou for work, for the school run, or for getting to North Beach Park, the practical move is to keep an eye on the city's own updates rather than treating "funded in April" as "closed in April." Seven years of near misses on this bridge is a good argument for waiting on the official word before rearranging your commute.

We follow local infrastructure like this closely because it shapes daily life here as much as any lakefront view does. If you've got questions about what's happening in your corner of Ferrysburg, or you're just curious how a project like this tends to affect a neighborhood over time, the Sandi Gentry team is always glad to talk through what we're seeing on the ground.