PB Americas has been awarded an $86 million contract to do the preliminary engineering and environmental impact study for the city's new fixed-rail mass- transit project, city officials announced yesterday.

PB Americas, the new name for the planning and engineering company Parsons Brinckerhoff, signed a contract with the city yesterday afternoon and is expected to take about two and a half years to complete the work, city spokesman Bill Brennan said.

The environmental impact statement, required by the federal government, will cover the entire 34-mile route of a mass-transit system stretching from West Kapolei to the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, even though the initial segment of the line is expected to be a 20-mile route.

Doing an EIS for the entire route will allow the city to move forward with additional construction when funds become available, Mayor Mufi Hannemann said.

"With the awarding of this contract, we'll move quickly into the next phase of work and I remain confident that we'll be able to keep our ambitious goal of breaking ground for mass transit in 2009," Hannemann said.

The bulk of the contract, $79 million, covers engineering for the system, including the selection of a technology type for the project. The city is envisioning an elevated, fixed-rail project that could be powered by electricity or magnetic levitation.

Included in the contract is $9 million for technology and vehicle selection, $2 million for rights-of-way assessment; $3 million for public outreach; $12 million for project control; and $53 million for engineering, including architectural, mechanical, electrical and structural design.

A five-member panel, made of up three city civil service employees and two private citizens, picked PB Americas over one other company bidding for the contract, Brennan said.

The company's local office also performed much of the early planning work for the project, including an analysis of potential alternatives, costing about $10 million. Nationally, it has about 10,000 employees developing and operating infrastructure projects in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and the Pacific.

It also was project manager for O'ahu's H-3 Freeway project, completed in 1997.