The contractor who will build the new Pensacola Bay Bridge that should serve the area over the next 50-plus years has been selected.
On Monday at the Florida Department of Transportation office in Milton, the FDOT selection committee responsible for choosing the design-build contractor selected New York-based firm Skanska USA Civil Southeast as the winner of the contract. Their designs were unveiled to the public Wednesday morning.
The firm happened to be the lowest bidder for the project, which has a current budget of a little under $470 million.
The technical scores and firm bids were announced last Thursday at the same FDOT office in the north end of the county, with Skanska coming in as the lowest bidder for the project at $398.5 million. 
Skanska underbid its next-lowest competitor, Johnson Brothers Corporation, by nearly $70 million. The other three firms in the bidding for the project all had bids over $500 million.
Despite being scored highest by the judges with a 93.2 out of 100, Anderson/De Moya/Leware was knocked down to third place for the project based on their high $509 million bid to complete the project, pushing Skanska to the top.
Skanska’s design for the bay bridge scored the lowest out of the five firms that were graded by the FDOT selection committee. The firm scored a total of 78.6 out of 100 points by the committee judges who graded the firm’s proposals on several different angles.
Skanska’s design drawings presented to the FDOT committee show an arch in the middle of the bridge, along with a pedestrian walkway, separated by a concrete barrier.
Despite the low design score, FDOT District 3 Public Information Officer Ian Satter, who was in attendance at both Milton meetings said the public will have a chance to give their input on the design, and that it can be altered.
“We have funding as part of the project that we can use to work with the contractor as far as design goes,” Satter said. “We will work with the public and the contractor…and hold a number of public input meetings…to come up with a final design. Public input will be an important aspect of this project”
This project won’t be Skanska’s first major undertaking along the Gulf Coast as they are currently wrapping up construction of a new US 331 bridge in Walton County, which has been under construction since 2014.
If they can prove their experience and complete the first leg of the project early, Satter said there are incentives headed their way.
“There is a clause within contract that they would get a $15 million bonus if they complete the first segment within a certain amount of time,” Satter said.
Last week, FDOT agreed to pay the City of Gulf Breeze $5.9 million for a plot of land inside Wayside Park, which the construction firm will be using to store equipment and vehicles during the construction process. FDOT will have access to that land over the next 7 years per the agreement between the two entities.
Skanska will break ground on the project at the end of this year or beginning of 2017 according to Satter.
The project is expected to take 1,408 days to complete, or a little under 4 years.
“Weather permitting,” Satter said.
