Nebraska-based company promised $73 million to design Key Bridge rebuild

First published Thursday, Aug. 29, 2024 in the Dundalk Eagle.

Maryland has selected Kiewit Corp. as the company tasked with rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The cargo ship Dali crashed into the bridge on March 26 after losing power.

Kiewit, based in Omaha, Nebraska, will start reconstruction next year, according to a press release the Maryland Transportation Authority Board sent out. The bridge is expected to be complete by 2028.

The company will receive up to $73 million for the first phase of the project, which includes designing the bridge, Director of Procurement Donna DiCerbo told the Board.

It’s unclear how much the company will charge for the actual building of the bridge and who’s paying. Maryland officials have estimated that the rebuild will cost between $1.7 and $1.9 billion. President Joe Biden has pledged that the federal government will foot the bill for the rebuild, but that still needs to pass Congress.

“The nation has your back,” he told Marylanders on April 5.

Maryland asked all companies bidding on the contract to give an estimate for how much they would charge to rebuild the bridge, assuming that it would cost a little less than $1.1 billion. Kiewit told Maryland it would charge about $1.23 billion, a markup of a little over $163 million. Of the three bids Maryland accepted for the rebuild, Kiewit charged the most, but the state judged it to have the most expertise.

“We were not looking at pricing as much as we were consideration of the qualifications of the proposers,” chief engineer Jim Harkness told the Board.

Harkness said they evaluated what staff members each company had, what work on a similar scale they had already done, how they plan to approach the project and how they plan to mitigate risks.

The first phase of the project will be completed within a year, Harkness said. Because the state wants the bridge to be up as soon as possible, it is using a process called progressive design build, where the state and the company constantly work hand in hand.