The City of Pullman’s downtown reconstruction project is running weeks behind schedule keeping traffic off Main Street until November.
Pullman Mayor Francis Benjamin says the city’s consultant leading the project, Welch Comer, informed staff on Wednesday that the project will not be done on time. Main Street downtown has been closed to traffic since April. Crews are rebuilding the underground utilities, will resurface Main and construct new wider sidewalks.
Under the current contract if Main isn’t repaved with at least one lane back open to traffic by October 15th the contractor, Apollo Construction, faces fines from the city. The consultant’s new schedule has Main reopening to traffic on November 1st. Completion of the entire project is now slated for November 22nd which is only two days behind the current contracted timeline. Once complete, Main Street will have two lanes with angled parking.
The delays have been caused by unforeseen underground work and more contaminated soil than what was expected. Rumors of delays began surfacing several weeks ago when Apollo started working earlier in the morning and on Saturdays.
Pullman City Council has to approve the new timeline. Major Benjamin expects council to consider adjusting the contract and timeline during an October 15th meeting. You can listen to Mayor Benjamin’s reaction to the delays below.
Welch Comer Vice President Matt Gillis says overall he is happy that the project is only a few weeks behind. You can listen to his comments below.
The delays are also causing the project to run further over budget. The City of Pullman signed the contract early this year without enough money to fully fund the work. Whitman County recently stepped up and gave the city 200,000 dollars to help pay for the overruns. That money approved by the county commissioners is from economic development funds. Mayor Benjamin says they city already needs to find another roughly 100,000 dollars to pay for the initial contract. There’s no word yet on how much more money Apollo Construction wants from the city to pay for the cost of the delays.
This is the latest in a series of problems with the project. The most notable issue is the survivability of downtown Pullman businesses while Main is closed to traffic. Councilmembers once again heard from several downtown business owners during their meeting this week about their struggles to stay open. Two downtown businesses announced in April that they were forced to close because of the project. The sidewalks downtown have stayed open to allow pedestrian access to those businesses.
Other stumbling blocks have involved timing for the work. Welch Comer first told council to rebuild downtown during the summer of 2023. Council initially agreed to the tight schedule but then changed course and pushed the work out to this year. The city’s first attempt to take the project out to bid failed last fall. No contractors bid on the work because of a four month construction window. Council then extended the timeline for the work to seven and a half months and Apollo won the bid for 8.7 million dollars. The total budget for the project was about 12 million dollars according to a council meeting from early this year.
There were also heated debates over saving the downtown trees which had to be removed. Another citizens group argued against the city building a new Walk of Fame monument in the Pine Street Pedestrian Plaza which led council to scrap that idea. The first plans for the rebuild included reconstructing Grand Avenue but that was scrapped due to cost overruns.
Initial plans called for the work to be done between Washington State University spring graduation and the start of the Cougar home football season. In reality the project closed Main before commencement and won’t reopen until most of the Cougar home football home games have been played for the season.
Most of the money for the work is coming from federal government COVID relief funds. That 9.5 million dollars had to be under contract by the end of this year to be to be spent or the feds were going to take the money back.