“We shot ourselves in the foot,” Applebaum said. “We never even took seriously the domestic bid.”

Not so, says Anziano. But with only one domestic bid, which came in at more than double the CalTrans engineers’ estimate, the state had a duty to look elsewhere.

“That’s telling you there’s something wrong. You’re not getting competitive bidding,” he said.

Opening the project to foreign competition was not a simple matter. It required some fancy legislative footwork that still angers some U.S. manufacturers, who saw the Bay Bridge as a unique opportunity to revitalize American manufacturing just as the nation was heading into a recession.

Early on, some in California saw the Bay Bridge project — necessitated when the existing bridge was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake — as a potential job creator.

Flush with wealth from the dot-com bubble, the state and Bay Area leaders mandated the new bridge be “iconic” in its design. The costs — and potential benefits to the winning bidders —ballooned.

After lobbying from labor and industry groups, then-governor Gray Davis won federal funding for the bridge. That meant the project was covered by a 1982 “Buy America” law requiring the state to give preference to American contractors.

But then the 2004 bid came in, just months after the new governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, took office. Hit by sticker shock, the Schwarzenegger administration decided to regroup.

“One of the things that stuck out was the Buy America component,” Anziano said. “That was restricting, and we heard this loud and clear from the construction community.”

So the administration reconfigured the funding formula for the 16 separate contracts that made up the Bay Bridge project. While most of the contracts would continue to receive federal funds and be subject to the Buy America requirement, the self-anchored suspension span — the signature segment of the project and by far the most lucrative — would be paid for with state and local funds, exempting it from the requirement.

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban such a maneuver in the future. It faces an uncertain future in the Senate. Regardless, it comes years too late for some who had hoped to win the Bay Bridge project, until the state changed the rules.

“We thought it was gamesmanship, that it was a way of getting around the system,” says Thomas Hickman, a vice president at Oregon Iron Works outside Portland.

His firm was part of a consortium, Bay Bridge Fabricators, that had been preparing a bid for the project. The proposal included a new, state-of-the-art fabrication plant to be built at the port of Vancouver, WA. Hickman says the factory would have been a huge boost to U.S. manufacturing capacity, allowing American firms to compete for even bigger projects around the world.