The cost of a major rebuild of Duluth’s “can of worms” interchange is 100 million dollars over the 343 million MN-DOT originally estimated, and the agency says it must postpone work on part of the project (the Garfield Avenue interchange and the Highway 53 bridge). Assistant District Engineer Pat Huston says some areas of such a complex project are difficult to estimate — for example, cleanup of contamination: “Even though a year-and-a-half ago when we put a budget number down we knew this was contaminated [but] what does that mean? Now we’ve had two years of environmental drilling, pulling water samples, and we’re trying to figure out what dirt can go where, what has to go to the landfill. Same thing for water.”
Huston says for the complete Twin Ports Interchange upgrade to be finished as originally scheduled, money would have to be taken from other projects — which would be “very undesirable” — or new money would have to be found. Huston says, “New money could take, I suppose, several different shapes. Could it be a bonding bill? Perhaps. I can’t say that we will be asking for that or not.”
Huston says with large and complicated urban projects like the Twin Ports Interchange, it’s difficult to estimate overall cost until actual design engineering is being done.