84th Street in La Vista Has Missed Its Own Deadline Twice. Here's What Still Works at City Centre.

Drive south on 84th Street through La Vista this month and you will hit the same cones, the same single-lane squeeze between Harrison and City Centre Drive, and the same detour signs that have been up in one form or another since last October. If you assumed the mess would be behind you by now, you were working off the city's own math. So was the city.

The 84th Street Trail Project has slipped its schedule twice in ten months, both times because of weather, and the most recent setback happened in July. That matters less as a traffic update and more as a planning tool: if you live near La Vista City Centre, the honest question isn't when construction ends. It's how to get to Let It Fly for dinner or drop off your car at Rocket Carwash without routing through a closed lane that may or may not still be closed by the time you read this.

A Timeline That Keeps Correcting Itself

The city set this project in motion with a clear sequence. Work began the week of October 20, 2025, with tree removal along both sides of 84th Street between Giles Road and Harrison Street, clearing room for new 10-foot-wide trails to replace the narrow four-foot sidewalks that used to run close to traffic. By late November, the median between Park View Boulevard and City Centre Drive came out, and the corridor narrowed to two lanes. That part went according to plan.

The bridge is the part that hasn't. Crews are building a new span over the Thompson Creek channel, with an underpass meant to finally connect the trail network between Central Park and Central Park West. Building over a creek channel means working around water, and water has not cooperated. A bad pipe in a storm inlet washed out the sub-base under the road earlier in the project. Crews patched it as a stopgap rather than tearing the whole section out, according to La Vista Public Works Director Joe Soucie, because they knew the fix was temporary and expected it to need redoing.

It needed redoing in July. Heavy rain caused that patched section to give way, and the city closed southbound 84th Street between Harrison and City Centre Drive on July 6, 2026 to deal with what Soucie described as a road bed close to caving in. That closure pushed back a shift to northbound lane work that had been expected that spring, and reset the clock on the whole second half of the project.

The city has been candid that this is a big undertaking, funded through a $12.2 million budget that includes a $5 million federal grant and $7.2 million from the half-cent sales tax voters approved back in 2014 specifically for 84th Street redevelopment. Big infrastructure projects near water tend to run into water problems. This one has now run into two.

The Detour That Actually Works

If you're trying to reach anything in City Centre right now, the useful information isn't the completion date. It's the entrance the city itself has been steering people toward. During events at Central Park, the recommended approach has been to enter City Centre from the south, off Main Street or Barmettler Drive, rather than fighting the single-lane squeeze on 84th Street directly. For anyone just passing through the corridor without a reason to stop, the city has pointed traffic toward 96th Street as the alternate route since construction started.

That distinction is worth holding onto. The through-traffic problem on 84th Street and the access problem for City Centre businesses are not the same problem, and they don't require the same workaround.

What's Still Open Inside City Centre

The businesses inside City Centre have kept operating through all of this, because most of what draws people there was never dependent on a smooth drive down 84th Street in the first place. The district sits behind Main Street, reachable from Barmettler Drive, with its own garage and surface parking separate from the corridor construction.

Right now you can still find:

• Let It Fly, the sports bar that took over the old City Pub space in August 2025 after City Pub closed, open seven days a week with a full bar and game-day seating
• Heights Draft Room, the craft beer bar with rotating taps that's become the after-work stop for people working in the offices above Main Street
• The Pen & Dagger, a boutique bookstore that opened as one of City Centre's newer retail tenants
• L'Elle Nail Spa, a full-service salon on Barmettler Drive
• Rocket Carwash and Waxing the City, both still running their usual hours
• First National Bank and Allo Communications, along with office tenants like Turf Tank

The Astro Theater, the indoor and outdoor venue anchoring the district next to Nines Plaza, has kept its concert calendar going through the construction as well. None of this is the district limping along. It's a district that was built with its own front door, and that front door doesn't run through the section of 84th Street that's currently torn up.

What Arrives Once the Bridge Is Actually Done

The reason the city is willing to absorb two rounds of delay is what's on the other side of it. Once the bridge and underpass are finished, La Vista plans to build a new community pool on the west side of 84th Street, replacing the one demolished to make room for this project. That's not a rumor. It's the stated plan from the same city communications team that's been tracking the construction delays, tied directly to finishing Central Park West as a usable amenity rather than a construction staging area.

There's also talk circulating on local development boards about a Marriott Springhill Suites filling one of the remaining empty lots on Main Street, though that one hasn't been confirmed through an official city or company announcement, so treat it as something to watch rather than something to plan around yet.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

The 84th Street project is going to keep missing its own deadlines in small ways, because it has already done that twice for the same underlying reason: building a bridge over a creek channel means the ground under the road is going to keep surprising the people building it. That's not a reason to write off the district. It's a reason to stop checking the city's projected finish date and start checking which entrance you're using.

If you're heading to Let It Fly on a Friday or dropping your car at Rocket Carwash, come in from Main Street or Barmettler, not 84th Street. If you're just driving through La Vista on your way somewhere else, 96th Street will save you the frustration. And if you're waiting on that new pool, the honest answer is that the calendar is less reliable than the underlying plan. The plan hasn't changed. The ground has, twice now.

If you have questions about what's happening in your corner of La Vista, or anywhere else in the Omaha metro, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate The Good Life Group is always glad to talk through it.