Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said last month that the city would have a clearer sense of final taxpayer costs for its public-private plan to rehab White Stadium this summer, but is now saying that figure will materialize by the end of the year.

The mayor’s apparent about-face came Tuesday during a brief radio interview, when she was asked if she could provide an updated estimate of how much the professional soccer rehab of Franklin Park’s White Stadium would cost taxpayers, in light of her prior remarks that the price would likely exceed $91 million.

“There’s always some level of cost escalation,” Wu said Tuesday on WBUR’s Morning Edition. “Unfortunately, in major construction projects, we end up putting out bids and whatever the price in the market is at the moment is what the city pays for any construction project.”

The city’s half of the roughly $200 million project nearly doubled, from $50 million to $91 million, at the end of last year. An internal city document revealed by Wu’s principal mayoral opponent Josh Kraft last month showed the cost to taxpayers was projected to climb as high as $172 million, a potential Wu acknowledged but described as a “worst-case scenario” at the time.

Last month, Wu said the city would have a clear picture of what the final budget would be after putting different aspects of construction out to bid, which she expected to begin later this summer. She doubled down on that timeline earlier this month, saying on a radio program that “we should know in a few weeks.”

But Wu backed off that timeline on Tuesday. She said construction is underway and some bids have gone out the door, with others expected to be released in the fall. The mayor, when asked, didn’t provide an updated cost estimate for the project, based on construction bids that have already gone out.

As far as when final costs would materialize, Wu would only say, “Later this calendar year, the bids should all be out the door.”

“We are seeing cost escalation, just in terms of the cost of steel, for example,” Wu said, referring to federal tariff impacts. “There’s not a great way to say this is going to be the exact number, because we’re subject to public procurement laws and the bids that come in.”

Project opponents — some of whom have sued the city and the for-profit group that owns the National Women’s Soccer League team set to share use of White Stadium with Boston Public Schools student-athletes in 2027 — quickly seized onto the mayor’s updated timeline.

“The city’s timeline doesn’t add up,” Dorchester resident Jessica Spruill said in a statement. “City officials were scheduled to receive millions of dollars in construction bids for the White Stadium project by this month. They should be able to tell us exactly how much the project will cost.”

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The so-called Franklin Park Defenders favor a scaled-down high-school-only stadium rehab that they say could be done at a fraction of the cost, or $29 million. Project delays have led the NWSL team, the Boston Legacy, to broker a deal with the Kraft Group to play their inaugural season at Gillette Stadium next spring, rather than White Stadium as initially planned.

The Kraft Group is owned by Robert Kraft, the billionaire New England Patriots owner and father of Josh Kraft, a mayoral candidate who opposes the White Stadium pro soccer plan, which has been championed by Mayor Wu.

“Boston residents deserve to know how much of the Boston Public Schools budget will be spent to build a massive professional sports complex for the benefit of private investors — before steel and concrete are in the ground,” Spruill said. “City officials need to make the construction bids they’ve received public, so that residents can know just how far over-budget the White Stadium project is.”