New Keesler AFB Division Street gate will provide straight shot from I-110 to the base
The new gate at Keesler Air Force Base is open to the public for those coming off the I-110 exit to the Division Street gate.
The gate is open for 24-hour access and more than 131,000 vehicles are expected to go through the gate annually.
Personal vehicles only are allowed to use the new gate until additional construction is complete. The visitor center is still open on White Avenue. Meadows Drive gate is now closed.
It took “nearly two decades to go from idea to realization,” said Col. William Hunter, commander of the 81st Training Wing at Keesler.
Work went on despite hurricanes, supply chain interruptions and COVID-19.
If one person had dropped the ball over those 20 years, the $37 million project wouldn’t be complete today, he said. The gate was funded and built in a partnership between Keesler and the federal, state and local governments, he said.
The White Avenue gate that has served as the main access to the base for years will be closed when this new gate opens. Railroad tracks are immediately south of that gate, blocking access when trains pass.
Hunter said the new gate will improve base security and accelerate the visitor screening process for the approximately 40,000 people a year who come into and out of the gate a year. A new visitor center was built adjacent to the gate.
It also will provide 24-hour access to the base in combination with the West Gate on Pass Road, something he said the base hasn’t had before.
With this work done, “We look forward to upgrading the west side of the base at Pass Road,” he said.
Still to come
Mayor Andrew “FoFo” Gilich said the new gate was an idea kicked around for decades and called it a “job well done,” from design through engineering and construction.
The final step will be to complete Division Street leading to the base. That requires two-week notice posted on I-110 that the exit will temporarily be closed, said Mike Leonard, Biloxi’s chief administrative officer, and about two weeks of construction in that area.
Once complete, drivers will have a quick shot from the Division Street exit down the new Division Street boulevard to the gate just beyond Forrest Avenue,
For years, businesses operated along Division Street. Ward 2 Councilman Felix Gines said he believes business will return once the gate opens and the traffic returns.
“I think this is going to open the east side considerably,” he said.
Seeing it through
Lt. Gen. Clark Griffith, retired, former commander at Keesler and a former Biloxi Councilman, said at the 2017 groundbreaking that the need for a new gate started right after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
“That’s when they changed the Air Force rules,” he said, requiring tighter security standards for military installations. “This will help us get back to compliance.,” he said.
Michele Edmondson, then base commander at Keesler, left for her new assignment the day after the groundbreaking.
She now is the commander of Second Air Force in Biloxi and was able to help complete the project with the ribbon cutting.
Once the work is done at the Division Street exit, she said, those who work on the base or visit there will have a straight shot to the new gate.
The White Avenue and Meadown gates will be closed most of the time, she said.
“This will not only be the public gate, it will be the vehicle inspection gate,’ she said. So all the traffic now being routed behind the hospital for inspection will come to the Division Street gate to help consolidate traffic and entrance to the base in one place.
This story was originally published May 26, 2022 at 1:02 PM.
