The bids for the fourth, final, and most expensive phase of the Brightman Street Bridge project are scheduled to be opened two weeks from today, marking the beginning of the end for a bridge project that was supposed to be finished in 2002, the year the Patriots won their first Super Bowl.

The bids were due to be opened in mid-December, but MassHighway officials decided to postpone that for a month because the project will be so complicated the state wanted to give bidders more time to submit their estimates.

Just the drawings for the project cover 950 sheets of 24-by-36-inch paper, according to MassHighway spokesman Erik Abell. “It’s a significant project.”

“We want to make sure all contractors have the time to fully review the minutia of the contracts,” he said.

The project will replace the current Brightman Street Bridge, built in 1906, which connects Fall River and Somerset via the Taunton River. The new bridge is just north of the old.

Work on the new phase is still slated to begin in the spring.

Construction is expected to take five years. Even if that holds, it would mean the bridge would be opening a decade later than officials originally expected when work on the project began.

There was supposed to be a fifth phase to the project that included constructing all the roadways connecting the bridge along Routes 6 and 79, but the new phase, with an estimated price tag of about $119 million, incorporates all that work as well, said MassHighway operations engineer Michael Delaney.

It includes the approach spans, concrete bridge piers, the drawbridge control house, bridge abutment and retaining walls, bikeways, walkways, utilities, signs, traffic signals, pavement markings and lighting.

It also includes removal of the existing Brightman Street Bridge once the new bridge is open to traffic, Delaney said.

But that probably won’t happen.

Local officials want to keep the old bridge intact so it can serve as a deterrent to the widely despised liquefied natural gas project proposed for Weaver’s Cove in Fall River.

LNG supertankers cannot pass through the old Brightman bridge because its drawbridge opening is too narrow.

Delaney said although demolition of the existing bridge is included in the bid specifications, they are a separate item so the state can remove that element of the project if it becomes definite that the old bridge will remain.

The just-completed third phase of the project, involving the bridge’s foundation, cost $32 million.