Bill for Olympia City Hall may rise

Council to consider proposal raising maximum cost to $35.65 million

By Matt Batcheldor | The Olympian • Published June 17, 2008

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OLYMPIA – The cost to build Olympia's new City Hall would jump from a maximum of $31 million to $35.65 million under a proposal the Olympia City Council will consider tonight.

All three design-build teams that are finalists for the job said it would be difficult to build the hall the city says it wants for $31 million, according to Assistant City Manager Subir Mukerjee.

"With the cost of construction and the cost of materials going up it would be pretty hard to get the project in within the limits that we had proposed," the three teams indicated, Mukerjee said.

The council has approved strict criteria for a City Hall with 90,000 square feet of office space and perhaps four floors on the old downtown Safeway property in the 600 block of Fourth Avenue East, Mukerjee said. The building must have "distinctive" architecture and be an environmentally friendly building that gets at least a certification of LEED Silver from the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

The $35.65 million maximum price doesn't include the price of land and environmental cleanup, Mukerjee said.

That does not mean, however, that the final price will be $35 million. Low price is a factor being considered in which of the three proposals to choose, said Councilman Joe Hyer, a member of the team helping to pick a proposal.

He said the project may not be possible for $31 million. "If it can't be done for that, I don't want to sacrifice quality and get a poor-quality product that doesn't last," he said.

"We also don't want somebody just jacking up the price" of the job, he added.

Three teams of general contractors and architects are vying for the job -- Hoffman Construction of Seattle/Belay Architecture of Tacoma, Mortenson Construction of Bellevue/Bassetti Architecture of Seattle and Skanska USA Building Inc. of Beaverton, Ore./YGH Architects of Portland. Each of the teams will present the City Council with its design for the building, perhaps in October, and the City Council will pick one, Mukerjee said. The city will pay the other two $150,000 apiece for developing the losing proposals.