A groundbreaking ceremony for the new Upper Pinal Creek Bridge (also known as Connie's Bridge), designed to replace the current bridge, was held in January 2023. A year and a half later the project is still a work in progress. On July 23 representatives of the contractor, Meridian Engineering, updated the Globe City Council on  the reasons why and said there is no ending date scheduled for the project.

The litany of delays presented by Meridian included drill shaft issues that took two and a half months to resolve, weather delays, adjustments to the new bridge's deck, rebuilding of gabion baskets, and concerns with the deck's top surface and bottom surface.

The new bridge is designed to better handle the flow of water in Pinal Creek – and, somewhat ironically, its construction has been stymied in part by those waters. Meridian representatives told Council that 30 days have been lost to weather, citing a wetter winter in 2022/2023 along with this summer's monsoon flooding. “The wash ran forever,” leaving them unable to get heavy equipment into the creek bed, they said of that winter. “We ended up putting some diversion pipes in. In the process of doing that the wash ran again, so we lost all of our progress and ended up doing it again.”

City Manager Paul Jepson added that those weather delays added up to more than the 30 days. “After they get back to work they don't just jump back in there and start up,” he told Council. “They have to get the mess cleaned up and re-situate.”

Each day lost to weather, said Meridian, comes with the grace of an additional work day.

Another delay came when gabion baskets installed along the creek had to be torn down and re-installed because, Meridian said, “They were just wrong. We own that mistake. We had some less than perfect installation on that, kind of mismanaged. We've moved on from several employees.” A Meridian representative admitted that “things got very chippy between the teams.

“After we rebuilt the gabions, they're in there the way they should have been the first time. Structurally, they're pinned. They haven't moved [in the recent rainstorms]. We've had two good floods over the last two weeks and we put a diversion dam upstream to keep the water off the Connie's side, so it's channeling – bouncing off the downstream gabion wall and then going where it needs to.”

It was also determined by Engineering that the deck needed to be raised slightly, which put the project behind by approximately three months. “We had to go in and put another layer of forming down to raise the bottom of the deck,” said a Meridian representative. “That cost probably three weeks or so.”

“In order to adjust the deck we had to go back to redesign, for the designer to give us new elevations and slopes,” added City Engineer Luis Chavez. “After that they did the readjustments, taking another couple of months.”

After the bridge deck was poured, said Meridian, some low spots and high spots were identified, “so we tried to clean them up, and then the City wanted a remediation plan. We're still in that process.”

Meridian also conducted two core drillings at the engineer's request to determine whether there were any cold joints, and found no signs of any. “We think those are not an issue,” Jepson said.

The project's next steps will be pouring an approach slab on the railway side; installation of railroad gates and signals, projected to start August 21; pouring an approach slab on the Connie's Market side, which will result in a full road closure for one to two weeks; sidewalk and road realignment; paving work on Hill, Carico and Broad Streets and Jesse Hayes Road; and demolition of the current Connie's Bridge. Councilman Fernando Shipley asked Meridian to salvage the handrails on the current bridge.

Citing the list of delays, Meridian said there was currently no scheduled ending date but that they will continue to update the city regularly.

“I guess at this point it's not really a matter of time, with all the delays,” said Mayor Al Gameros. “It's a matter of expecting quality of work. We should concentrate on getting the end product, not worrying about the time frame.”