A number of residents from the Zion community of Kemper County called on the Kemper County board of supervisors to replace two wooden bridges they say are unsafe.

For more than 20 years years residents say they have been asking for the 70-plus year old bridges to be replaced.

"This is what bothers us. Every year they say, 'next year and next year!" said Jessie Hunt.

"We've been lied to several times," said Cornelius Parks. "We had a letter last year stating that work would be constructed on this road in the first of 2008, the first of the spring or early summer. And here we are now going into early fall and nothing has been done."

Parks said that buses, unloaded, weigh about 9,000 pounds. The sign at the bridge shows a weight limit of 6,000 pounds.

Later in the day, director of transportation for Kemper County Schools, Jerome Jackson, said the district's smallest buses weigh 25,500 pounds, unloaded.

Board members say needed changes have been made and the bridges should be replaced soon.

"It's always been a right-of-way problem and an easement problem about making sure they've got all the right-of-way," said Board president Mike Luke. "From what I understood, the right-of-way has just now been completed, as far as that letter I read in there a while ago, that document to State Aid says that the right-of-way has been completed. The utilities have been signed. So, now today it's ready to go and that hasn't been done in the past."

Luke says work on the bridges could start as early as spring of 2009.

If this doesn't happen, these citizens say a representative from the community went to Washington to discuss the issue in the 1990s and would go again if needed.