ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – Two projects OK’d by the city early in 2012 with hopes of completion before summer have been delayed by state procedures.

Orange Beach had hoped to have a traffic light installed at the entrance to the Sportsplex on Canal Road before the start of the busy summer tournament season. The City Council approved expenditures and got preliminary state approval back in January.

Another project to enhance a wetland along the east side of Alabama 161 between Marina Road and Cotton Bayou Drive was also slated to be done before summer. It is still under review by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management which will make changes to the design.

Now both projects will have to wait until the busy summer season passes.

“They have procedures that they have to follow,” Orange Beach Environmental and Planning Director Kit Alexander said of the traffic light. “We were hoping to have it before this summer.

“Regardless of whether the DOT said they were going to do it or not they still have to go through the standard procedure of traffic warrant analysis in Montgomery. According to ALDOT in Mobile we’re talking at the earliest this fall.”

The plan was to move lights on Canal Road at the entrance to the Orange Beach Convention Center to the Sportsplex entrance. Alabama Department of Transportation Director John Cooper approved the move last year.

Crews began the process of dismantling those this week.

Alexander said even with the lights, the city would still have to man the intersections to control the flow of cars.

“I believe that regardless we needed to have police officers there anyway because during these large tournaments having an automated system is not always the best situation,” she said. “They’ve got to be able to put eyes on it and manually address traffic when it’s a significant amount of traffic that happens at the same time.”

The Alabama 161 wetland enhancement’s goal was to take what has been somewhat of a problem area and improve it aesthetically and environmentally. It is being funded by a grant from the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

“There’s a wetland area that occurs on the east side of 161 and on the north side of Cotton Bayou Road, just a little south of where that first wooden foot bridge is,” Doug Bailey of Hutchinson, Moore & Rauch Engineers in Daphne said. “The wetlands that are there, you can see driving by. Every time it rains there’s some water that ponds out there.”

Bailey said the plan was to remove some invasive species of plants and trees from the area, make the wetland deeper and put native plants back in the area. Those plants, he said, will provide a better filter for the water before it flows into Cotton Bayou.

ADEM’s still reviewing the design and will make some recommendations and changes before work can begin, Alexander said.

“We are redesigning to address some concerns that ADEM had regarding how the wetlands were to be enhanced,” she said. “They wanted minimal excavation if any at all in the existing areas.”

The plan passed the City Council in February and construction was expected to begin an estimated six weeks later.

“Since we weren’t able to get construction going before the big tourist season we are now going to begin construction following the tourist season so we don’t have construction traffic and tourist traffic on 161 causing any more delays than there already are,” Alexander said.

Plans are still in place to place aerators with fountains and lights once the wetland project is completed. And plants will be in place to help clean the water before it eventually drains into Cotton Bayou.

“You don’t get a lot of treatment (of the water) out of what’s out there now, there’s no continuation as far as the water flow,” Bailey said at the February meeting. “It pretty much goes through there and if you go by there and stand at the ditch at Cotton Bayou Road, that water’s constantly trickling through that pipe and straight out to Cotton Bayou.”

He hopes signs explaining the plantings and describing the plant life can be included in the project.

“People walking up the sidewalk, they can kind of see what those species are with some photographs, a plaque, maybe something to tie into the Sea, Sand, Stars program,” Bailey said. Sea, Sand, Stars is a museum maintained at Orange Beach Elementary School.