With Soaring Price Tag, Town Scales Back Transfer Station Project

CHATHAM – The town had planned two phases of improvements at the transfer station: one to improve safety for workers, and a second to improve efficiency and reduce noise and odors. In light of higher-than-expected cost estimates, the select board is scaling back the project to focus on worker safety first.

Town staff opened sealed bids for the two-phased project last month and learned that the low bid came in at $7.02 million, $1,988,516 higher than the $5.04 million available for the job. The first phase, improvements to the recycling area, jumped by around $400,000 to $3.17 million. But the second phase, which involves high-priority improvements to protect worker safety, increased more markedly by around $1.75 million. The select board asked staff to explain the price hike.

“The strength of the economy, the level of construction activity in the project area, and the available pool of qualified contractors were noted as the big issues why this escalated,” DPW Director Rob Faley said. There was a lack of qualified sub-bidders for a number of components, including the climate control system, which came in with a low bid of $526,000, “over three times higher than what we anticipated,” Faley said.

While town counsel opined that the job could be re-bid since the first bids were higher than the available funds appropriated by voters, the town’s consultant, Weston and Sampson, does not recommend doing so, “and I have to agree,” Faley said. “Many times you go back to the drawing board and you cut things out of a project and you’re left with a substandard building but the cost winds up being very similar to what you had bid in the first place,” he said.

“I’m not going to enjoy spending more money than we were projected to,” select board Chair Cory Metters said, but he agreed that an additional delay is likely to cost taxpayers more, and there is a pressing need to improve working conditions for transfer station staff. “To me, this is a promise to our employees that we want to get something done for them,” he said.

“We have OSHA issues that we need to take care of,” board member Shareen Davis added.

“I feel like I was snookered,” member Jeffrey Dykens added.

“I’m not in support of making any contractor wealthy on our backs,” Faley said. “The alternative would be to scrap it and go out to bid again.”

Board members reluctantly agreed to use the available funds to tackle the high-priority phase of the work. They will next discuss a strategy for going back to town meeting to ask voters for additional funds for the lower-priority improvements.