BRADY TWP — Four bridges in Butler County will be replaced this summer as part of the state’s rapid bridge replacement project.

State Department of Transportation officials on Thursday discussed that work at their annual county outreach meeting in Brady Township.

PennDOT earlier this year finalized its $899 million Rapid Bridge Replacement Project contract that will replace 558 bridges across the state during the next three years, including 11 in the county.

The Plenary Walsh Keystone Partners group will handle the work for all the bridges and will maintain them for 25 years.

Work on Saxonburg Boulevard over Bull Creek in Clinton Township and on Cruikshank Road over a tributary of Glade Run in Middlesex Township will begin in May.

Construction on the Freeport Road bridge near Caldwell Drive over a tributary of Thorn Creek in Jefferson Township and the Zelienople bridge carrying Route 68 over Glade Run in Zelienople will begin later this summer.

George McAuley, assistant District 10 executive for maintenance, said the projects will be completed quicker and at a lower cost than typical PennDOT work.

“It’s a faster track than the normal pace,” he said. “And we expect rapid delivery.”

Dan Galvin, a spokesman for Plenary Walsh, said grouping the bridge work together allows for the contractor to use economies of scale in each phase of design and construction, reducing the price of the projects.

“We can package a lot of the aspects of the different bridges together,” he said. “We can have parts mass produced for a number of bridges.”

The average project cost per bridge is $1.6 million, Galvin said. Through PennDOT’s standard process, the cost to build and to maintain a bridge would average more than $2 million.

In the future, three bridges in the county will be replaced in 2016, while four bridges will be done in 2017.