Two dozen people sat around a long table in a conference room on a recent Tuesday afternoon. The topic at hand? A single steel pile.

Years from now, that pile — essentially a 200-foot rod — will become a tiny part of one of Maryland’s most ambitious and costly infrastructure projects ever.

Here, in an otherwise unassuming office park in Hanover, is the design headquarters for the new Francis Scott Key Bridge. As many as 100 employees work inside to orchestrate logistics, map out the bridge’s precise design, and estimate its cost and schedule.

On a mid-December visit, the workspace was decorated for the holidays. Workers, including engineers and project managers, gathered by a coffee machine or sat at desks, talking on phones and analyzing diagrams on computers. Conference rooms are named for the Steelers, Eagles and Terps, playful nods to various employees’ favorite sports teams.

On the walls: zoomed-in photos of the vestigial bridge structures still in the water and drawings detailing the geological makeup beneath the Patapsco riverbed.

One dry-erase board featured a quick, miniature sketch of a fender that will protect the new bridge. That drawing depicts what will eventually become a football-field-sized piece of the new span.

The bridge is costing more and taking longer to rebuild than officials had originally expected. It will replace a span that connected Dundalk and Hawkins Point from 1977 until March 2024, when a cargo ship struck it, tumbling it into the water below.

Without the bridge, which carried about 34,000 vehicles a day as part of the Baltimore Beltway, other nearby thoroughfares have been saturated. An estimated 18,000 more vehicles take the Fort McHenry Tunnel a day and 7,000 more use the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel as compared to before the collapse, according to the Maryland Transportation Authority. Some commutes have increased from 30 minutes to 45 minutes or more.

In the weeks following the collapse that killed six construction workers, officials pegged the replacement’s cost at less than $2 billion. After in-depth analysis, they greatly increased that figure in November to between $4.3 and $5.2 billion, and bumped the reopening target from 2028 to 2030.

Gov. Wes Moore and the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy met last week and agreed to “accelerate” construction, but did not offer any update on the timeline.

From Fort McHenry and other vantage points, onlookers can see flashes of progress at the Key Bridge site. A flotilla of vessels supports massive cranes and workers as they dismantle the old bridge and test out components of the new foundation.

But even now, much of the work takes place in an office.

The Maryland Transportation Authority, which owns the bridge, and Kiewit, the Nebraska-based contracted builder, share the office space as they work together on the design. Roughly half of Kiewit’s employees working on the project are based near Baltimore, while the rest regularly travel in.

Kiewit and the authority are aware of complaints from traffic-weary residents that the process is taking too long. Wayne Thomas, senior vice president with Kiewit, stressed the difficulty of emergency rebuilds as compared to long-anticipated construction jobs.

“It kind of takes time to make the sauce,” he said during an office tour, “but I think the team is moving very quickly.”

With Kiewit, Thomas has worked on other massive, cable-stayed bridge projects, including the Goethals and Kosciuszko bridges in New York. But he has local ties, even naming his daughters Laurel and Katyn after nearby communities.

“I have some vested interest here,” he said, “but also from a career standpoint, this is pretty awesome, what we are doing here.”

The bridge is now more than 70% designed — a major checkpoint — and as plans are finalized this year, the headquarters will relocate. Initially, the team needed a place to work from quickly. But as efforts shift from design to actual construction, the group will find a location closer to the worksite.

“With traffic and things like that, it’s almost 30 minutes away from the project,” Brian Wolfe, the authority’s director of project development, said of the current space.

Kiewit and the authority each work in separate halves of the Anne Arundel County office, but work as one team, officials said, and regularly come together for meetings.

That team, however, will soon be positioned on opposite sides of a negotiation.

They’ll have to agree on the projected final cost of the bridge this spring.

It behooves Kiewit, which would receive the contract, for that number to be high; it behooves the state, which has said it will be a responsible steward of the federal dollars expected to pay for the project, for that number to be low.

If the two parties are not able to agree on a price, they could end their partnership, and the authority could seek another builder. That seems unlikely. In general, progressive design-builds — the particular type of construction method being used — continue with the same builder about 85% to 90% of the time, experts say.

Each side has estimated the final cost independently, but operate under the same assumptions. The two groups are not working “in a vacuum,” Thomas said. Instead, they are “making the omelette” together, jointly deciding design specifics and equipment needs, and so on.

“We know what we’re building,” Thomas said. “Now it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get ’er done.”