Granite and Super Excavators win $324.8 million Cleveland sewer tunnel contract

The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District has awarded the Big Creek Tunnel contract to Granite Construction and Super Excavators, a $324.8 million job Granite announced in an Oct. 1 release. The award marks the seventh and final large-diameter storage tunnel under the district’s $3 billion Project Clean Lake, and it arrives with no public account of how that program is financed.

The work is large-diameter tunneling in the plainest sense: 22,300 linear feet of 20-foot-diameter bore plus 3,115 linear feet of ancillary tunnels, along with shafts, diversion structures, gate and screening structures, gate control vaults, consolidation sewers and an overflow box culvert, followed by associated sitework, restoration and utility relocations. Granite, based in Watsonville, California, is joined by Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin-based Super Excavators on the job.

The bore runs more than four miles through rock, between 50 and 100 feet beneath Cleveland, Linndale and Brooklyn. Once the structures are in place, the district expects them to eliminate 550 million gallons of combined sewer releases each year, keeping that volume out of Lake Erie and the surrounding waterways.

Big Creek is the seventh and final large-diameter combined sewer overflow storage tunnel under Project Clean Lake, the district’s $3 billion, 24-year program launched in 2011 to meet Clean Water Act standards and improve regional water quality. Across all seven tunnels the program is designed to hold back 4.5 billion gallons of overflow from Lake Erie, and the final contract arrives 15 years into that schedule. Jim Nickerson, vice president of Granite’s tunnel division, said in the release that the project’s “scale and complexity” align with the contractor’s strengths in large-diameter tunneling and shaft construction.

Public water work has been a reliable source of big prime contracts in 2026, with the release listing a $1 billion Ohio River Tunnel contract in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, for a joint venture of Lane Construction and Brayman Construction, and a $518 million floodwater project in Virginia that FlatironDragados began construction on earlier in the year. In June the U.S. Department of Transportation earmarked $1.86 billion for infrastructure damaged by storms, water systems among it, following Hurricane Helene in September 2024.

Neither the release nor coverage of it says how Project Clean Lake is financed: not the mix of debt, grants or rate revenue, not the district’s remaining procurement calendar. That gap is the ordinary condition of municipal utility tunneling: the award is public, the capital behind it is not, and the private funds this desk usually follows appear nowhere in the paperwork. With all seven storage tunnels now spoken for under this program, the next awards of comparable size in the region will run through other owners’ programs, as the Allegheny County and Virginia jobs already suggest.