PULLMAN, WA – The final report on the City of Pullman’s downtown reconstruction project was presented to city council this week.
The work began last year and included rebuilding Main Street, the underground utilities, installing new sidewalks and additional amenities. Main had to be closed to traffic downtown during heavy construction. When the project began in April of last year, Main was scheduled to be closed for seven and a half months. Construction delays set the project back a month before traffic eventually returned to Main on November 13th.
The contract with Apollo construction initially included a fine of 3,000 dollars a day against the company for every day that Main was closed past October 15th.
Pullman City Council pushed back the completion date multiple times to settle on the eventual reopening date of November 13th which the contractor made. City of Pullman Public Works Director Sean Wells told council this week that no fines were levied against the contractor. Additional delays caused the entire work to run behind schedule by another six months sending the project into a second year. Total completion was reached last month. The initial timeline called for all work to be done by mid-November.
The project also ran around 350,000 dollars overbudget equaling a roughly 3% increase. The initial total budget including design and project management was near 12 million dollars. Actual construction costs came in less expensive than estimates by about 400,000 dollars landing at 8.6 million.
The final number on total extra expenses after some savings ended up being covered by a one million dollar Washington state grant, 300,000 dollars in economic development money from Whitman County and about 100,000 dollars from Chevron to clean up contaminated soil. Most of the funding for the project came from 9.5 million dollars in federal government COVID relief funds. Another 1.4 million dollars was spent from the city’s street and utility fund.
One over expense that wasn’t in the initial contract was the hiring of a production company to create social media videos about the project. The city hired the consultant firm Welch Comer to manage the downtown rebuild. Direction from city hall for improved project communications to the public led managers to hire Recraft Creative in Pullman. City of Pullman officials say they don’t have records showing how much the company was paid directing that question to Welch Comer.
Welch Comer’s spokeswoman Courtney Kramer stopped accepting questions from Pullman Radio News in late October. Kramer hasn’t responded to a recent request for details about how much they paid Recraft. The reference to social media video expenses was included in documents detailing project cost overruns to city council. That line item never included a dollar amount which differed from other work that ran overbudget that did include detailed expenses. One reference to how much the company was paid comes from its CEO and talent Adam Ratliff. Ratliff explained in a January social media video that his company received between 60,000 and 75,000 dollars for producing about 50 videos which took hundreds of hours of work. Those videos portrayed the project in a positive light while it ran months behind schedule and overbudget.
The Pullman downtown rebuild was a saga of controversies going back multiple years. Pullman City Council initially voted to conduct the work in the summer of 2023. That schedule was quickly pushed back a year to 2024 with an initial plan to close Main for four months. Welch Comer told council at the time that the work would close Main to traffic right after Washington State University spring commencement and reopen before the start of the Cougar football season. When no contractors bid on the project the schedule was extended to seven and a half months. In the end only one Cougar football home game was played last season with downtown Pullman open to traffic.
Other hot button issues included public outcry from some resident over the removal of the large downtown trees which had to go to rebuild the sidewalks. Another group of citizens argued against building a new downtown Pullman Walk of Fame monument in the Pine Street pedestrian plaza. That work item was removed from the project. Many downtown Pullman Main Street businesses voiced strong concerns to city council about being able to survive a four month traffic closure which eventually turned into 8 and a half months.
Now that the work is complete downtown Pullman has thousands of feet of new water, sewer and stormwater lines. Main Street has a new surface along with new sidewalks, pedestrian crossing, curbs, stoplights, dedicated bike lane and fresh landscaping. City officials told council that this was the largest public works project in Pullman in many years and possibly the largest in the community’s history.
