A local construction company from Atglen is part of a new Pennsylvania Department of Transportation project to farm out the replacement and 25 years of maintenance for 558 structurally deficient bridges across the state.

J.D. Eckman, Inc. was named one of 11 subcontractors for the project’s winning bidder, Plenary Walsh Keystone Partners, which submitted a 28-year, $899 million Rapid Bridge Replacement Project starting next summer and lasting three years.

“This initiative reflects Gov. Corbett’s strong commitment to taking innovative steps to bring improvements to the state’s roads and bridges more quickly and at reasonable cost,” PennDOT Secretary Barry J. Schoch said in a recent announcement. “This agreement helps Pennsylvania take a big step to cutting further into its backlog of structurally deficient bridges.”

The bid offers an average cost per bridge of $1.6 million, hundreds of thousands less than the $2 million or more PennDOT would normally expect to spend.

Read more about the project and its winning bidder on the PennDOT website here.