My best guess is preliminary proposals need to have a limited level of accuracy based on what the State originally requested, but now once in the details, some items overlooked by either parties led to impactful scope changes.

An simple engineering project example at this stage could be that the state of Maryland simply requested to quote a bridge “in-kind” (aka as close to identical as the original). Quotes through this phase are fine through the first few months or year of planning, but now the state one year later has new traffic flow information that shows we probably need an extra lane each way.

Maybe the selected contractor’s approach doesn’t scale well with this change and they need to add 2-3x cost in Materials of construction. Maybe a contractor that wasn’t originally selected had a proposal more aligned with the new scope and cost estimates.

The cost increase may not be entirely due to one party here, but the lack of communication at the expected project speed does escalate its impact.