Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers broke ground on 31 August on the $1.8 billion John A. Blatnik Bridge replacement, carrying I-535 and US 53 over St. Louis Bay between Duluth and Superior. The construction contract is $930 million. Two contractors bid.
A two-horse race for a billion-dollar bridge
Ames-Kraemer Joint Venture II, pairing Ames Construction of Burnsville, Minnesota with Kraemer North America of Plain, Wisconsin, was named apparent best-value proposer when bids opened on 23 June. MnDOT used an adjusted-score system combining technical score and price. Parsons holds design and construction oversight contracts and did the preliminary engineering design.
The field of two is the number to sit with. Complex long-span design-build in the upper Midwest has a bidder pool you can count on one hand, and an owner running best-value selection with two proposals is running a comparison, not a competition. That’s not a criticism of MnDOT’s process. It’s a description of the market for this work.
What replaces it
The new structure is a tied-arch bridge planned at 8,300 feet on the existing alignment, with an added shared-use path and an expected 100-year service life. Construction is slated to start in early 2027 and complete in 2031, though MnDOT’s own release describes phased construction running 2026 through 2032. That discrepancy is in the source material and hasn’t been reconciled.
Funding is $400 million from Minnesota, $400 million from Wisconsin and a $1.058 billion INFRA grant awarded to both DOTs in January 2024. Planning began in 2020, with more than 25 alignment alternatives evaluated and five carried forward.
The existing bridge opened in 1961 and was renamed in 1971 for 14-term Rep. John A. Blatnik. It was designed for 154,000-pound loads and has been posted at 80,000 pounds since 2019. Without replacement, MnDOT and WisDOT projected closure by 2030. It carries more than 33,000 vehicles a day and, by MnDOT’s count, more than 265,000 trucks a year moving nearly $4 billion in goods to and from the Port of Duluth-Superior, the largest U.S. port on the Great Lakes.
The gap between $1.8 billion and $930 million
Roughly half the program number isn’t construction. Right of way, design, oversight, utility work, contingency and escalation carry the rest, which is a useful corrective every time a megaproject headline gets read as a contractor’s revenue.
Labor figures from the ceremony conflict and should be attributed: Walz said more than one million labor hours, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar put it at 1.5 to 1.75 million. Jack Carlson, president of the Duluth Building Trades, framed the duration well: "An apprentice can start working on the project, and by the time the bridge is built, it could be a quarter of their career." Chairman Bruce M. Savage of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa noted the site sits in the 1854 Ceded Territory and that the band’s Tribal Employment Rights Office expects to work with MnDOT on training access.
Freight-clearance work has been the theme in heavy civil this cycle, from load-posted bridges to the double-stack rebuild of the Howard Street Tunnel in Baltimore. MnDOT’s release is here.