A Balfour Beatty Joint Venture was the low bidder at $65M for a North Carolina bridge project expected to cost $130M.  The Winston-Salem Journal noted that the I-85 Yadkin River Bridge project covers about 4 miles of road and the bridge widening.

What does a bid like this tell us about our industry? Perhaps a few things:

1. Design engineers and architects are often terrible at budgeting construction costs.
2. The construction bid market is amazingly competitive these days.
3. Balfour Beatty really hammers down the estimates.

I remember when Balfour Beatty beat GA &FC Wagman (a part of the company I was working for at the time) on the Lancaster Rt 30 road and bridge project. It was about $100M and Wagman was second by $83,000. Joe Wagman said they lost it by less than 1/10th of a percent or “Coffee and Donuts money”.

When Balfour Beatty was working on the project, they got in numerous disputes with PennDot and headed to litigation. I heard one of the Balfour Beatty guys was talking with a PennDot guy and mentioning that things were headed to the lawyers. The PennDot guy said, “That’s ok, we have attorneys on staff.”

The Balfour Beatty guy replied, “Yeh, so do we, but our guys went to Harvard.”

Later I read in the newspaper that the judges mostly ruled against PennDot. It wasn’t a big surprise.