PROVIDENCE — After a seven-month financial drought, the state Department of Transportation is about to resume the multimillion-dollar flow of contracts that build and repair the state’s highways and bridges.

Edmund T. Parker, the DOT’s chief engineer, said his agency hopes to advertise 16 contracts, worth an estimated $29 million, for bids from contractors this month and next, after the release of $104 million by the Federal Highway Administration. The highway administration acted after Congress approved new transportation legislation.

The construction season is generally considered to start in mid-April and continue into December. But because of the time it takes to initiate and formalize contracts, Parker said, “we’ve lost most of the construction season.”

In a normal year, the DOT would have been putting contracts out to bid and awarding them through last fall and winter. But for lack of money, the DOT, with very few exceptions, stopped advertising for bids on new projects in August and stopped awarding new contracts in late September. Throughout the period when no new federal money was coming in, however, the DOT was able to continue its big multi-year projects, such as the relocation of Route 195 and the replacement of one span of the Washington Bridge.

Parker said the DOT couldn’t start issuing contracts earlier because it needed a firm commitment that the money would be available. The Federal Highway Administration approved Rhode Island’s allocation for the $104 million March 26, he said, and the DOT is hoping for its approval of specific projects this week. He said the agency hopes to ask for bids beginning April 18.

He said it takes about three months to advertise projects, get bids from contractors and award the contracts. That means contracts that would ordinarily have been awarded in the spring won’t be awarded until summer. As a result, “we’re going to run out of our construction season very quickly,” Parker said. The advertising and bidding process is designed to give contractors a chance to bid, bringing competition and getting taxpayers a better price for the work.

Some of the contracts the DOT has chosen for the first group of projects seem, at first glance, to be less than urgent, involving sealing cracks in highways and striping pavement. However, Parker said, the work is weather-sensitive and needs to get started. For example, crack sealing won’t work in the cold, and if that relatively cheap job isn’t done, it can lead to major road deterioration that is expensive to repair, he said.

The most expensive projects on the list are the $7.8-million rehabilitation of the Main Street and School Street Bridge over Route 146 in North Smithfield and improvements to the Jamestown-Verrazzano Bridge, with an estimated cost of $3.5 million.

Parker was unable to say which projects will have to be put off until 2008. He said that financing has been so uncertain that long-term planning hasn’t been possible. For the last three years, he said, “we’ve been going from month to month because we’ve never known how much money we’d have available.” Congress passed a six-year, $286-billion federal transportation act in the summer of 2005, including $1.2 billion for Rhode Island, an increase of more than 20 percent. The more than $200 million per year Rhode Island gets in federal highway aid is divided among various transportation programs, where the state can largely decide how to spend it, and so-called “earmarks,” money that Congress designates for specific projects.

The DOT stopped issuing new contracts after it exhausted the $52 million in program money it had received of the $156 million it was expecting this fiscal year. In addition to the $104 million just approved, Parker said the DOT is still expecting $52 million for earmark projects.

Here is a list of the first group of projects the DOT plans to advertise for bids:

Crack sealing, northern and eastern part of state, $250,000; crack sealing, south and central part of state, $250,000; demolish Shearman building at Sakonnet River Bridge, $600,000; statewide pavement striping, $1.4 million; pavement striping, northern part of state, $2.75 million; rubberized asphalt chip sealing, $1.1 million; Route 146/Rt. 116 landscaping, $675,000; improvements to Warwick Neck Avenue, $1.7 million.

Also, Wanskuck and Hawkins Street bridges over Route 146, $3.4 million; pavement striping, East Bay, $1.6 million; improvements to Jamestown-Verrazzano Bridge, $3.5 million; high hazard intersections, Wampanoag Trail, $3.1 million; rehabilitation of Main Street and School Street Bridge over Route 146, $7.8 million; Block Island sidewalks and Bridgegate Square, $2.2 million; Station Park interim landscaping, Providence, $300,000; Warwick interposal station, Bayls remediation, $250,000.

blandis@projo.com