The city of Ottawa has received a $1.7 million grant for work on the Post Street Bridge over Goose Creek.

Mayor Robert Hasty announced the grant at the recent State of the City event, hosted by the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.

“We just got a $1.725 million IDOT grant,” Hasty said. “I’ll tell you that our economic development director and our city engineer warned me ahead of time that that is a very long project with a lot of state applications, and that we should expect it to take a number of years.”

It was brought up in the Q&A portion of the event.

The Ottawa City Council approved phase two design work in January of this year, focused on final design plans and preparation for construction.

Despite the long timeline for the project, Hasty is encouraged by recent developments.

“We’ve been pleasantly surprised every step of the way, and the project’s actually moving along much faster than we anticipated,” he said. “I believe we’re hoping that it might even be completely done in about two years time. I’m not exactly sure when we’ll be able to get work going, but the timeline on it has shrunk significantly from what we were telling people six months ago.”