Last week, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) announced that it would give the three teams bidding to design and build the downtown deep-bore tunnel up to an extra year to complete the job, pushing opening day as late as November 2016.

PubliCola called the bidding teams---Seattle Tunneling Group, AWV Joint Venture and Seattle Tunnel Partners---to find out which teams had asked for more time and why. Seattle Tunneling Group declined to comment, and AWV Joint Venture and its team members did not return our calls.

However, Richard Page at HNTB Corp., a Bellevue-based engineering firm that belongs to the team Seattle Tunnel Partners, said today that his team did not ask for more time---the other two teams did. Page said he didn't know why the other teams asked for an extra year.

While WSDOT extended the deadline for the job by nearly a year, they also offered the contractors a reward for committing to finish the project ahead of schedule, and imposed financial penalties---up $50,000 a day---for finishing the project late.

Page said the fact that Seattle Tunnel Partners did not ask for extra time will not give them any advantage over its competitors in the bidding process.