State officials announced this week that they plan to split the work on the Francis Scott Key Bridge into four separate contracts going forward, in hopes of increasing competition and lowering costs.
Tuesday’s announcement came three weeks after the Maryland Transportation Authority announced it was parting ways with the current contractor, Kiewit Infrastructure, because of an “unacceptably high” bid on the second phase of what is now, officially at least, projected to be about a $5 billion project.
Officials never said what price Kiewit was proposing for the second phase of the project, only that after weeks of discussions the state “decided that their bid was unacceptably high,” Maryland Transportation Secretary Kathryn Thomson said at the time…