March 8, 2007

Lone bid for airport station is $95M; estimate was $52M

Image courtesy of Sound Transit [enlarge]

The Sea-Tac Airport station will be the last of nine light-rail stations to be built between Seattle and the airport.

Sound Transit received just one bid to build a light rail station at Sea-Tac Airport and it was almost twice the engineer's estimate, the agency said yesterday.

Mowat Construction bid $95.3 million. Sound Transit had pegged the project at $51.8 million.

“It got my attention,” said Ron Lewis, deputy executive director of Link light rail for Sound Transit.

The airport station will be the last of nine light-rail stations to be built between Seattle and the airport.

The two Sodo stations, built by Kiewit, are finished. Obayashi is building the stations at Beacon Hill and Mount Baker. RCI Herzog has the contract for three stations along Martin Luther King Jr. Way and PCL Construction is building the station in Tukwila.

The bids for all of these stations, except for Obayashi's, were within the Sound Transit engineer's estimate.

Sound Transit held a pre-bid conference in January for the airport project, and it was well-attended, Lewis said.

He said contractors may have decided not to bid on the airport station because they knew Mowat was already doing work for the agency in Tukwila. Mowat has a $41 million contract to build light rail tracks south of the Tukwila station.

The tight construction market also played a huge role, he acknowledged.

“They're being a bit more selective about their opportunities,” Lewis said.

Cost estimator Sandra Matson of MatsonCarlson Architects spends a lot of time talking to general contractors about what projects they are bidding on and why. She said she was not surprised at the bid price or that Sound Transit received only one bid for the airport station. General contractors have work coming out of their ears, she said.

“They're not bidding public work, period,” Matson said. “And they are booked for the next two years with privately funded projects.”

“Public projects come with a lot more strings attached,” she added.

Last year, Wilder construction was the low bidder to build the Canyon Park Freeway Station for Sound Transit. That bid was 31 percent over the engineer's estimate.

(Editor's note: This story has been changed to correct the name of the contractor for the Canyon Park Freeway Station.)

The agency decided not to rebid that project because it didn't think it would save any money, according to capital projects director Jim Edwards.

Over the next few weeks, Sound Transit will be reviewing Mowat's bid for the airport station. It could decide to negotiate with Mowat or reject the bid and start over, Lewis said.

Sound Transit might choose to break the project into smaller pieces so smaller firms could bid on it.

“We have heard that Sound Transit projects are so big we price out mid-sized contractors,” Lewis said.

The agency could also decide to redesign the station.

Whatever Sound Transit does, it will have to work fast to keep the airport station on schedule.

Trains from downtown Seattle are supposed to start rolling into Sea-Tac in 2009.

The airport station was designed by Hewitt Architects. Hatch Mott MacDonald was the engineer.