The state Department of Transportation’s long-overdue, far over-budget Barrington Bridge project is taking so long to build that part of the temporary bridge that traffic has been using will have to be repaved — for the second time.

DOT Director Jerome F. Williams also said in an interview that construction of the new bridge and the removal of the old one won’t be finished until the fall of 2010, reflecting the latest in a series of delays.

To get the project moving again, DOT officials have agreed to a number of expensive changes at the contractor’s insistence. But they left it unclear whether anyone outside the DOT itself caused the project to go wrong.

By the time it is finished, according to current DOT estimates, the bridge will cost more than $22 million, more than twice as much as the contract price. It will also have taken almost seven years to build, more than twice as long as the contract allowed.

“This is what I’d call a problem project,” Williams said. He inherited the bridge project when Governor Carcieri named him in December to replace James R. Capaldi, who had retired.

Bids for the project were opened Aug. 8, 2003, with Shire Corp., a Providence company specializing in bridges, the low bidder at $10.35 million. The second-lowest bid, $10.98 million, was from Aetna Bridge Co., of Pawtucket. The contract was awarded to Shire in October, and was supposed to be completed in September 2006.

Instead, with the work far behind schedule, the state paid Shire $5.3 million in September to settle the company’s claim that the DOT caused the delays.

THE SETTLEMENT document set a June 30, 2009, completion date for construction, and Williams said, “The bridge will be open for traffic by the end of May 2009.”

The settlement also said the work was to be complete, with the old bridge removed, by July 31, 2009. However, the agreement contained a number of exceptions, and Frank Corrao II, the DOT’s deputy chief engineer, said that completion date assumed that no redesign would be necessary, and that since it was, the date doesn’t apply. As a result, he and Williams said that all the work won’t be completed until September 2010, nearly seven years after the contract award.

The bridge carries Route 114, a heavily traveled secondary road running up the east side of Narragansett Bay, across the Barrington River. Replacing it has dragged on for so long that the temporary bridge, built in 1997, has already been resurfaced once, in 2004. Now, Williams said, “there’s a portion of the temporary bridge that needs to be repaved.”

Williams said that his priority has been “to get traffic on the new bridge.” To do that, he said, he has tried “to keep this project moving, and keep it moving with all of us working together.”

If the DOT had not reached the settlement agreement with Shire, Williams said, “it could have come to a stalemate again. We could have debated this for a long time.”

Instead, the project is moving ahead. After long periods when there was little sign of work on the bridge, Shire has been making progress. All six of the piers — the reinforced concrete structures in the river that will support the bridge — have been completed. Corrao said Shire is now working on the abutments, the structures that will support the ends of the bridge, and on the causeways that will extend from shore to the abutments. The new bridge is to be 284 feet long and two lanes wide, like the rest of the road.

DOT officials left it unclear who, if anybody, outside the DOT might be responsible for the situation.

With the $5.3-million settlement, the DOT accepted blame for the delays to that point. “The fact of the settlement tells us that the contractor is not liable,” Corrao said. Shire officials didn’t return calls last week.

In December, Brian Stern, then state director of purchasing, said the state was seeking “a determination on the design engineer’s culpability” and looking into recovering money on the project, possibly from Siegmund & Associates, the Providence engineering firm that designed the bridge.

But Williams said last week that he doesn’t consider Siegmund at fault for the project’s problems, despite the DOT’s agreement to redesign portions of it.

“They did not get it wrong,” Williams said of Siegmund. Corrao said Siegmund has been kept on the job for the redesign work.

Ambiguities in the specifications, unexpected site conditions, the need to stop construction during a fish-spawning run, and other problems all slowed the project, he said, and “a communication breakdown” at the DOT contributed to the trouble, with the agency failing to address issues Shire raised.

“It’s all of these issues compounded,” he said, adding up to years of delays and cost overruns.

Corrao said that nobody at the DOT has been held accountable because “there’s no one individual responsible for any one decision.”

BEYOND THE $10.35-million contract price, the biggest added cost is the $5.3-million payment to Shire to settle the company’s claim that it had been unreasonably delayed by the DOT.

Other added costs include $3.6 million in change orders — payments to Shire for additional work — and $2.75 million to pay Shire for the cost of implementing the design changes.

Corrao said that the changes in the bridge design affect the foundations under the horseshoe-shaped abutments at each end of the bridge.

Corrao said the foundations under the abutments, rectangular concrete slabs called tremies that are poured underwater, have been made much thicker, 6 feet high rather than 2 feet.

“We were confident of the two feet,” Corrao said, but he said Shire wanted six feet, saying the change was needed because of the possibility that water pressure from below would upset the thinner tremies.

The original plan called for piles driven into the river bottom under the sections of the tremies immediately under the abutments, Corrao said. The new design includes piles under all of the tremies’ area, he said.

Another change, Corrao said, was the addition of steel sheeting along the sides of the causeways. The sheeting, which is visible at the work site, is used to form a cofferdam to keep water out of the work area. The change allowed the contractor to seal off smaller areas during the work, he said.

Corrao said the changes were made at Shire’s insistence, with experts from Shire and the DOT disagreeing about their necessity and Shire raising safety concerns.

Williams called the outcome “a compromise to keep the project moving in the safest way possible.” He said he also wanted to avoid “a disagreement that would further delay the project.”

Corrao said Shire wanted $3.6 million for the additional work caused by the design changes, but that the DOT bargained the price down to $2.75 million.

Williams, a former top official in the state Department of Administration, said he has tried to avoid a repetition of the project’s problems by creating a steering committee whose members range from the project engineers to the DOT chief engineer, Edmund T. Parker, the agency’s second in command. The committee meets every two weeks, Williams said, which “lets us address issues right away.” He said the project is now a week to 10 days ahead of its new schedule, and that he hopes to keep it that way.

blandis@projo.com