Last week, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority opened five design-build bids for construction of the second phase of the Silver Line Metrorail extension. The contact award, to be announced in May, will likely go to the lowest bidder: Capital Rail Constructors — a group that includes Bethesda-based Clark Construction, which offered to build 11.4 miles of track and six stations for $1.177 billion. Phase 1 winner, Bechtel Transit Partners, came in second at $1.19 billion.

Both bids were considerably lower than MWAA’s own inflated estimates. Bob Bruhns, an electrical engineer from Herndon who has been warning for years that the Silver Line is “massively overpriced,” believes that MWAA built huge price escalations into its estimates so that it can later claim that the overpriced project came in “on budget.”