BISMARCK, ND (AP) North Dakota’s Transportation Department plans to send construction companies a new round of invitations to build a Missouri River bridge, three weeks after none of them wanted the job.

Francis Ziegler, director of the agency’s project development division, said the job will be bid again in April, with companies given until October 2008 to finish construction.

The Transportation Department estimates the Liberty Memorial Bridge will cost more than $40 million. It will replace a bridge, built in the early 1920s, that links Bismarck and Mandan.

When the original bid-submission deadline for the job arrived Nov. 18, no company had responded. Ziegler said companies that were capable of the job were preoccupied at the time with bidding construction work on the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast.

Three of the six companies contacted afterward by the Department of Transportation said they would be interested in bidding the project in the spring, Ziegler said.