The downtown Pullman reconstruction project is now nearly month behind the original schedule.
Late Thursday afternoon the consultant on the project Welch Comer issued an “excited” announcement that Main Street in downtown Pullman was repaved. The firm then reported that they “anticipate” that Main won’t be open to traffic until November 11th. That’s eleven days past the current, already delayed, deadline of tomorrow, Friday November 1st for at least one lane of traffic to be open on Main or the contractor would face fines from the city. Welch Comer reports that striping and traffic signal work will take another eleven days to get Main back open to traffic. Welch Comer’s media spokeswoman Courtney Kramer is no longer responding for requests for comment from Pullman Radio News. Kramer is directing all questions to Pullman Mayor Francis Benjamin. You can listened to Mayor Benjamin’s disappointment with the further delays below.
Pullman City Council recently extended the fine deadline for getting Main back open to traffic by two weeks to Friday, tomorrow November 1st. Mayor Benjamin says city staff and Welch Comer are negotiating another contract amendment to push the deadline back for a second time. City council can’t consider approving that new proposed deadline until November 12th.
Welch Comer told Pullman City Council throughout last year that the project would take four months. Main Street has been closed to traffic since April so the project is taking nearly twice as long as the consultants initially claimed. The most recent delay was caused by excessive contaminated soil that was discovered under Main. Welch Comer is being paid by the city in four phases for leading the project. Their most recent contract phase alone has the City of Pullman paying the firm over 1 million dollars for managing construction and providing public relations.
This is the latest in a string of miscues for the major project. Welch Comer initially convinced Pullman City Council to quickly put the project out to bid for the summer of 2023. Council changed direction and delayed the work for a year. When council followed Welch Comer’s advice and put the contract out to bid for a four month window last fall no contractors bid on the work. The project was eventually awarded to Apollo Construction of the Tri-Cities with an extended construction window between April and mid-October for this year.
Other issues involved public battles over the fate of the old downtown trees that had to be removed. Another debate involved an initial plan from Welch Comer to build a new Pullman Walk of Fame monument in the pedestrian Pine Street Plaza. Council ended up scraping the idea for building monuments in the plaza. Welch Comer originally planned for a much larger project including the reconstruction of Grand Avenue downtown but that portion of the work ran overbudget. The contract for Apollo Construction came in overbudget and the City of Pullman has had to find additional money to pay for the deal including securing 200,000 dollars in economic development funds from Whitman County.
Downtown Pullman Businesses on Main remain open for pedestrians. Two downtown businesses closed last spring citing the work as the reason for going out of business.
The City of Pullman is using 9.5 million dollars in federal government COVID relief money to pay for most of the roughly 12 million dollar project. Crews have replaced the underground utilities, repaved Main and installed new wider sidewalks. If the city didn’t have the money contracted to be spent by the end of this year the feds were going to take it back.
Welch Comer spent 2023 telling Pullman elected officials that the work would be done between Washington State University Spring Commencement and the start of the football season. The now “anticipated” reality has the project closing Main for all but one of the top 25 Cougar’s home football games.