Jacksonville Harbor: Costs of the 40-Foot Deepening

The Jacksonville Harbor Project, first authorized as a Federal navigation project in 1880, follows the St. John's River for approximately 27 miles (43.5 kilometers) in northeast Florida, beginning at the river's entrance to the Atlantic Ocean and ending near the downtown area of the City of Jacksonville. The main feature of the project is a shipping channel for large, ocean-going, commercial vessels, and includes other features such as jetties and training walls. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Jacksonville Port Authority are the Federal and non-Federal sponsors, respectively, of the project. Since its initial authorization, the project has received eleven additional authorizations from Congress for improvements. The most recent one was in 1999, for deepening the project from 38-feet (11.6 meters) to 40-feet (12.2.m). In 2002, an additional five-mile (eight-km) segment was added to the deepening effort. Construction is taking place in three phases and began in 2001, continuing to today. The Corps of Engineers' project life cycle spans from planning through engineering and design to construction and then operation and maintenance. The planning phase for very large navigation projects such as Jacksonville Harbor can last five years, engineering and design two years and construction can be phased over multiple years. While the Corps has a mechanism for accounting for inflation in budgeting for construction costs over this extended life cycle, it is not unheard of for a project to proceed well into the engineering and design phase when it is realized that the project may cost more than expected, sometimes even more than the inflation adjustment allowed. By studying construction costs developed in the planning phase for the Jacksonville Harbor Project deepening and comparing these to contractor bid prices, and by focusing on the assumptions made during planning and the design details in the plans and specifications, valuable lessons learned are identified. These lessons learned can be applied to future planning projects in an effort to better capture construction costs. For the Jacksonville Harbor 40-foot (12.2 m) project, anticipated construction costs at the time of planning were $60,000,000, in today's dollars. The total contractor bid price was $110,000,000. Assumptions made during planning that may not have held true include character of the subsurface, dredge plant availability and lack of inclusion of certain construction techniques (rock blasting) in permits. Also, partnering with the dredging industry during planning might contribute important technical considerations to planning level designs and cost estimates.