The Manitou Incline appears to e bogged down by government red tape, judging from a story by Seth Boster of the Colorado Springs Gazette.

A $2 million repair project was expected to begin this month on the popular 1-mile jaunt  up the side of Pikes Peak. It marks the third and final phase of a $5 million erosion mitigation project funded by a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant.

The city of Colorado Springs, however, turned in only one bid for the job to the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. That caused the state agency overseeing the grant money to hit pause.

The agency wants to make sure Colorado Springs taxpayers don’t wind up footing the bill for the stair-stepper, if the single bidder doesn’t meet federal requirements to get reimbursed.

“That’s not uncommon, but our goal is to get them every dollar they were allocated,” agency spokeswoman Micki Trost told Boster.

The state isn’t yet telling the city to rebid the project, but it has asked for a thorough cost analysis of the project.

The city office didn’t return Boster’s call Monday. In an e-mail last week procurement official Nicole Spindler said she anticipated awarding the bid to a contractor in early August and that the state had requested “additional information” but did not elaborate, Boster wrote.

The delays raise concerns the work might face into winter weather. The first two phases each took three and a half months to complete.

“If we are much past the end of August, we’ll have to push it back a year,” Karen Palus, director of Colorado Springs Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services, told Boster last week.

Steve Bodette, overseeing the project as the parks department’s capital project coordinator, told the Gazette late Monday, “It’s in procurement’s hands now.”