On graphs with girth at least five achieving Steffen's edge coloring bound

Vizing and Gupta showed that the chromatic index $\chi'(G)$ of a graph $G$ is bounded above by $\Delta(G) + \mu(G)$, where $\Delta(G)$ and $\mu(G)$ denote the maximum degree and the maximum multiplicity of $G$, respectively. Steffen refined this bound, proving that $\chi'(G) \leq \Delta(G) + \left\lceil \mu(G)/\left\lfloor g(G)/2 \right\rfloor \right\rceil$, where $g(G)$ is the girth of the graph $G$. A {\it ring graph} is a graph obtained from a cycle by duplicating some edges. The equality in Steffen's bound is achieved by ring graphs of the form $\mu C_g$, obtained from an odd cycle $C_g$ by duplicating each edge $\mu$ times. We answer two questions posed by Stiebitz et al. regarding the characterization of graphs which achieve Steffen's bound. In particular, we show that if $G$ is a critical graph which achieves Steffen's bound with $g(G)\geq 5$ and $\chi'(G)\geq \Delta+2$, then $G$ must be a ring graph of odd girth.