MoPac toll project bid comes in under estimates

The low bid for adding express toll lanes to North MoPac Boulevard came in well below expectations, toll authority officials said Wednesday, allowing engineers to consider up to $20 million in enhancements to the project.

The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority board awarded the contract for final design and construction of the 11-mile project Wednesday to a consortium led by the Colorado-based engineering firm CH2M Hill. The $136.6 million bid was more than $62 million below the second-lowest of the three bids submitted, and about $33 million below the mobility authority’s estimate of $170 million.

The Texas Department of Transportation has seen consistently low bids in recent years, as construction companies competed for work during the economic slowdown. In a couple of cases, including the construction of two MoPac flyovers at U.S. 290 and other work in Central Texas, firms went bankrupt and left projects to be finished by other companies.

The mobility authority’s engineering director Wes Burford said that will not be a problem with the MoPac project because CH2M Hill is a financially strong company. And CH2M Hill project manager Joe Schroeder said the company’s low bid reflected several design innovations that will save money.

“We don’t consider our number to be anything but realistic and achievable,” Schroeder said.

The authority estimates that an additional $45 million or so will be spent, or has already been spent, on engineering, project oversight, toll equipment and installation, a 10 percent contingency and $275,000 payments to the two losing bidders for the costs they incurred preparing their offers. So that would leave about $20 million from the $199.5 million that the agency has available for the project, most of it from TxDOT.

Officials could not say Wednesday what upgrades might be planned for the project — more sound-suppression walls are one possibility, they said, as well as aesthetic improvements — but said they will decide as CH2M Hill works on the final engineering in the coming months.

The project, which likely will start construction sometime this summer, will add a fourth lane to each side of MoPac (Loop 1) between Lady Bird Lake and Parmer Lane in North Austin, as well as about seven miles of sound walls along the highway. Those new lanes, which would be the inside lanes and separated from the free-to-drive traffic alongside, would have tolls that would fluctuate constantly to keep traffic free-flowing.

Construction should take about 30 months, Schroeder said, and lane closures typically will not occur during peak commuting times or on Saturday during the day.

“Essentially, we look at this project as a nighttime job,” he said.

Left unresolved, for now, is whether the southbound toll lane will include an exit onto West Fifth Street, as has long been the case with traffic on MoPac. City officials since late 2011 have told the mobility authority that they would prefer that the southbound express lane empty only onto West Cesar Chavez Street, not West Fifth.

Austin City Manager Marc Ott spoke briefly at Wednesday’s authority board meeting, mostly exchanging pleasantries with the board. Later, he addressed the West Fifth issue in an interview with the American-Statesman, acknowledging that the city has no legal ability to control the express lane design.

“I also know they want to do what’s in the best interests of the city and the neighborhoods near there,” Ott said. “They’re sensitive to that.”