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The Oregon Department of Transportation is returning to the drawing board to improve a tunnel and bridges along Oregon Route 58 in Lane County.

Aumsville-based Capital Concrete Construction Inc. in 2012 landed the $9.4 million contract to fix the aging Salt Creek Falls Tunnel and four failing bridges east and west of it. Two of the bridges have been fixed and other repairs have been made; however, the original completion date was scheduled for Sept. 30, 2013, and the contractor estimated in February that it wouldn’t finish until Nov. 4, 2014.

“Right now we’re just working out issues, and we mutually agreed to terminate the contract right now,” Capital Concrete Construction President Ken Garcia said. “That’s about all I can say. It was a challenging project for both sides.”

Because the project site is at 4,100 feet, and weather is unpredictable there in the fall, the revised completion date didn’t work for ODOT, which suspended operations in March. ODOT announced Tuesday that the two parties agreed to terminate the contract, said Rick Little, ODOT’s Region 2 spokesman.

“We couldn’t take a chance of the highway being left in some sort of restricted configuration if this place were left unfinished,” he said.

Capital Concrete Construction experienced significant delays starting with winter snows that held up construction through much of April 2013.

“We recognized delays of 17 days due to weather,” Little said. “They have expressed their position that it was a whole lot more.”

Other challenges included the job site’s remote location nearly two hours drive from the closest concrete plant in Eugene.

Because of the difficulty of hauling wet concrete to the site, Capital Concrete Construction had changed ODOT’s original design from a pour-in-place concrete deck to a precast concrete deck. Little declined to comment on the impact of this change, saying it was a sensitive topic to the discussions under way between ODOT and the contractor.

“I really don’t want to discuss that,” he said. “The two sides are talking.”

ODOT will need a new design to finish the project, which is expected to go out to bid in 2015. Little said the project is still on budget.

“Our intention is to get a new project design and complete construction by (the start of winter) 2015,” he said. “We haven’t charted the direction of construction, mostly because we have been engaged in discussions with the contractors.”

Copper Runyon, co-owner of Chiloquin-based Hub City Chrome, welcomed news of the respite in construction work on Route 58. Hub City Chrome is a truck supply and rental shop that serves truckers heading in both directions over the pass.

“Right now, we’re doing our happy dance because they’re taking the year off,” Runyon said. “Our worst nightmares were realized last summer when we learned that the job wasn’t going to be completed in a two-year time frame.”

Hub City Chrome’s business was down about 30 percent during construction season as truckers took Interstate 5 instead of Route 58.

“We lost a lot of business,” Runyon said. “It was almost like somebody shut off the lights.”