In the spring, attorneys, engineers and state officials will enter a negotiating room.

They will likely exit with the actual, sort-of-final cost of replacing the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

Despite Gov. Wes Moore‘s repeated commitments to keep the high-profile rebuild on time and on budget, the project’s image took a hit last week as officials revealed that initial estimates were off by two years and billions of dollars.

The state and its contractor, Kiewit, now peg the cost of the structure at between $4.3 and $5.2 billion, more than double the initial estimate, and put its opening date at the end of 2030 instead of 2028.

Yet that new price tag remains an approximation — albeit a more informed one than the original — until Maryland and Kiewit sign a construction contract and agree on a binding price.

And if they can’t, Maryland might have to find a new builder.

The two parties have worked together on designs, demolition and preconstruction for more than a year. But they’ll be on opposite sides of a negotiating table in April, when they seek to agree on the price that the state, using federal dollars, will pay the building giant.

Much about the bridge is known: It will have a 1,665-foot main span, its roadway will stand 230 feet above the water, its protection systems will require 276 large, concrete-filled steel piles, and so on.

But a lot can be debated within the pricey details.

“You really get into the nuts and bolts,” Jim Harkness, the state’s chief engineer, said in an interview Tuesday.

That agreed-upon price — which still could fluctuate afterwards — should fall in the $4.3 billion to $5.2 billion range outlined last week, Harkness said. That range includes analysis from the state and Kiewit, as well as a third-party firm hired by the state early this year.

If the two sides don’t come to terms, however, the state would exit the agreement and find another contractor interested in the lucrative deal.

Kiewit was identified by Maryland last year as the “progressive design-builder,” an increasingly popular construction method in which one firm is on board throughout, instead of a designer and then later a builder.

But the deal between Kiewit, which hired powerful Annapolis lobbyists last year, and the state hinges upon an agreed cost. Otherwise, the state can take what’s referred to as an “off-ramp” and ditch Kiewit in favor of a new builder.

It behooves both parties to avoid that path, though: Kiewit would lose out on billions of dollars worth of work and searching for a new builder would slow the rebuild, perhaps by years, fatiguing commuters who want to return to their route.

The off-ramp is taken in roughly 10-15% of progressive design-builds, said Keith Molenaar, dean of the University of Colorado-Boulder’s College of Engineering & Applied Science.

If Maryland chooses that route, the state would take Kiewit’s designs and search for other firms to execute them.

Exiting the deal would reintroduce competition to the project, but it’s unlikely that would result in any cost savings, Molenaar said.

“The market is telling you what the price is at this point,” he said. “It would be really difficult to get a redesign that’s going to be significant savings.”

Becky Blankenship, a progressive design-build consultant, said the majority of pricing is “driven by market conditions for labor, equipment and materials — not contractor fee.”

The span’s higher price is due, partially, to a larger-than-anticipated bridge, state officials have said. Moore pointed to “deteriorated” economic conditions nationally and “trade policies out of Washington.”

President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, has blamed Moore for the “ballooning costs.”

“The Trump administration does not write blank checks, and as the Secretary warned Wes Moore, oversight of this project is sorely needed to ensure taxpayers dollars are being used efficiently,” Danna Almeida, a Duffy spokesperson, said in a statement.

James Ports, who served as Secretary of Transportation under former Gov. Larry Hogan, asked, “How could Governor Moore be off by 100% or more?”

“Quite frankly,” Ports said in an interview, “he and his team should have done their homework better.”

Moore has stressed that the first cost projections were made “less than two weeks after the initial crash and before any engineering or design studies were conducted.”

All year, officials have backed away from those early estimates without providing more details.

When Moore was asked in February whether he was confident that the bridge would remain within budget, he deferred to then-Secretary of Transportation Paul Wiedefeld, who said that figure would be updated in the coming months. Officials said the same thing through the summer and fall.

Molenaar, the engineering professor, said he “felt bad” for the state, since they didn’t come up with a “good initial estimate.”

Construction projects have gotten pricier in recent decades, due in part to environmental concerns and increased costs of labor, experts say. But they’ve long been hard to predict.

There are some success stories, such as the state’s Nice-Middleton Bridge finishing under budget in 2022, but there are often examples like California’s Bay Bridge project — which cost billions more than first envisioned.

“I think it’s on the rare side that things don’t escalate in cost. This is a pretty big jump, though,” Norma Jean Mattei, a Louisiana-based civil engineer, said of the Key Bridge.

About 34,000 vehicles crossed the Key Bridge daily, far fewer than other major spans such as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, but there are still traffic impacts.

Last year, travel time on alternate routes around the bridge increased between 30-50%, according to Michael Pack, founder of the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Transportation Technology Laboratory.

Bruce Gartner, the authority’s executive director, emphasized the continued impact on commuters during a board meeting Tuesday. Members then approved a work order, paving the way for additional demolition and rebuilding activities, even as officials eye negotiations in the spring.

“We are keeping our foot on the gas,” Gartner said.