A two-lane bridge across Knik Arm and roads connecting to it would cost an estimated $686 million, according to a cost estimate released Tuesday by the state Department of Transportation.

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The estimate, prepared by a consultant hired by the state, is the first independent assessment of how much money would be needed to build the long-discussed crossing between downtown Anchorage and a sparsely developed part of the Mat-Su Borough.

It closely tracks an estimate released in December by the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority, an agency created by the state during the Murkowski administration to push for a crossing. The authority estimated the current cost at about $683 million.

And yet a third cost review is in the offing. The Federal Highway Administration, the agency that will decide if the project goes ahead, is expected to send a team to Anchorage later in the month to complete that one.

The state's estimate, posted online Tuesday, is based on concept designs and quantity projections of necessary materials supplied by the authority or its contractors. It says the Knik crossing project is laced with pricey, hard to anticipate risks that will have to be shared by the eventual, privately financed contractor and the "owner" -- the state and the bridge authority -- if the crossing is to be feasible.

It doesn't include more than $40 million of mostly federal money already spent on studies to develop the plans, and it doesn't include money for a link to Gambell and Ingra streets that will be needed by the early 2020s to divert bridge traffic from downtown.

Rob Campbell, director of design and construction for DOT's central region, said the state decided to commission the independent estimate last year because "a lot of people had concerns about the cost," and the agency wanted to find a way to double-check estimates that had been prepared by the bridge authority.

"We felt it was a reasonable expenditure of time and effort to verify or find an independent assessment of the project costs to give us some degree of confidence as to the cost of the project," Campbell said in a phone interview Tuesday.

A poll paid for and released by the bridge authority earlier this month shows continued support for the project, but it's not without critics, including Anchorage's Acting Mayor Matt Claman and Assemblywoman Sheila Selkregg. Both are members of a joint state-city transportation planning committee.

"I've always said the economic case for the bridge hasn't been made," Claman said Tuesday.

The new cost estimate breaks the project down as follows:

• $373 million for a two-lane bridge extending from north of the Port of Anchorage to Point MacKenzie in Mat-Su.

• $214 million for roads on the Anchorage side, extending from the north end of the C Street viaduct.

• $99 million for roads on the Mat-Su side.

The report said the $686 million estimate is for construction costs only. Oversight of the project would add another 5 percent to 10 percent, and changes to the project as conceived could add more costs.

Building a four-lane project instead of two lanes would raise the cost to $811 million, the new report said.

A 24-page summary of the estimate prepared by The National Constructors Group includes six pages of potential risks that could increase the cost of the project. They range from unpredictable subsurface conditions like huge boulders that could affect pile driving to delays caused by the need to adapt construction work to the presence of Cook Inlet beluga whales, which were listed as endangered last year.

Some of those risks are already included in the estimate. Many others, the report says, are not, and the bridge authority or the state will have to come to an agreement about sharing the burden of extra expenses to make the project viable.

"The design and construction risks for this project are extraordinarily high," the report says, but "manageable" if the state, the authority and the eventual contractor can come to mutually acceptable solutions.

Without such an agreement, the report says, "the project will not be economically feasible."

In an e-mail late Tuesday, the bridge authority's executive director, Andrew Niemiec, said contracts would be written to "allocate risks between the parties."

In a telephone interview earlier, Niemiec and other authority executives said they had expected the state's estimate to come out close to their own.

"We've done enough estimates leading up to this that we had a high level of confidence in the numbers we were producing," said Verne Geidl, the authority's chief engineer.

A final Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed bridge was completed more than a year ago, in December 2007, and the bridge authority has been awaiting a "record of decision" -- essentially a go or no-go -- since then.