PORT TOWNSEND — The Port Townsend City Council approved an additional $178,000 needed to meet the lowest bid for work planned on Tyler Street.
The project in total was listed at $732,000 in the council’s agenda packet Monday night. The lowest bid for the portion of the project currently underway came in at $463,635.
“I still think this is an amazing project,” Public Works Director Steve King said. “It’s fixing a huge liability and that road has just tanked in the last few years. Overall, huge value. But it is a significant cost increase, I want to point that out.”
The work could start soon, King said.
“We met Friday with Northern Asphalt, the apparent low-bidder, and their sub-consultant Sound Concrete,” King said. “They have an opening in their schedule and they want to get contracts signed, like immediately, and be out there in like two weeks to try to knock it out.”
The contractors have an aggressive schedule and hope to complete the project in 30 to 40 days, King said.
The work will include paving over the street from Lawrence Street to Jefferson Street and adding a cement-treated base.
“It’s just like an old house,” King said. “When you start uncovering it, you find out how bad things are. We’ve added cement-treated base, like we did on the test strip on Lawrence, so we can pave Tyler Street and hopefully not come back to it for 20 years.”
King said previous patch jobs done near the Port Townsend post office in 2019, which lack cement-treated base, already are failing.
The city also will complete an ADA-accessible route on the sidewalks between Lawrence Street and Jefferson Street, King said.
Northern Asphalt was the lowest of six bids that came back recently, King said.
Originally out to bid in 2024, the Tyler Street repave was planned to be completed in conjunction with work being done on Lawrence Street.
After receiving no bids, with contractors overbooked, the city put Lawrence Street out to bid alone, King said. That work has now been completed, he added.
King presented the council with three choices. Accept the lowest bid, reject the lowest bid to re-bid, or reject the lowest bid and abandon the project. King said staff recommended the first option.
He said he doubted going to re-bid would generate lower bids.
The bid process itself would add $30,000 to $50,000, a typical sum, and the project would be pushed until probably September, a busy season for the Port Townsend Farmers Market, located at 650 Tyler St.
“There’s now potholes and trip hazards where the farmers market resides, so we can’t have that,” King said.
King said the work, which likely will overlap with the opening weeks of the farmers market, is unlikely to interrupt the market.
There will be a several day period of actually paving of the street, but most of the work will take place on the sidewalks, he said.
Abandoning the project would mean losing grant money and letting the road fail, King said.
The $178,000 approved Monday will come from Transportation Benefit District (TBD) dollars, King said. That is in addition to the $145,000 already budgeted from the TBD, he added.
The city received a $379,354 pavement preservation grant from the Transportation Improvement Board in 2022. The grant does not cover sub-grade cement treatment, King said.
King said the way the bids have gone, the city only qualifies for $305,840 of the funding. King added that he has requested that the state let the city keep the remainder to reduce the cost to the TBD, but he does not expect it will.
“That grant was intended to overlay the street only,” King said. “That grant also intended that our staff would do some small patching dig-out pavement repair, where the pavement was starting to fail.”
King said he’s grateful that voters supported the formation of the transportation benefit district and that he expects other projects to use the fund significantly.
“It’s not getting any better. We are 10 years late to the game on some of these streets,” King said. “I look at them every day. You just get a little bit of rain and let the pavement dry, and you can see all the cracks.
“In the five years that I’ve driven all these streets, it’s just got significantly worse.”
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
