At a public meeting Tuesday, Sept. 1, the Orcas Island Fire Board of Commissioners opened six sealed bids from contractors to construct a new fire station in Deer Harbor.

Ranging from $923,150 to $1,363,727, every bid was significantly over budget. The district has $600,000 in levy funds already granted for the construction of the station excluding permitting and design costs.

“These are all well over our budget. We’ve got some work to do,” Commissioner Clyde Duke said.

All of the bids were from Orcas contractors, except for the lowest bid, which was from Tye Contracting, Inc. of Silverdale. Owner Josh Tye lived on Orcas between 2000 and 2006 and has family still here. He’d like to move back to the island with his own family. If awarded the job, Tye Contracting plans to use Orcas Island subcontractors.

According to Tye, when contractors began preparing their bids, they were the first to realize it was not feasible for the project to be done within budget.

“All of us had either made a phone call or an email expressing our concerns. Right away we knew this wasn’t going to come even close to what the budget was,” he said.

Tye said it is not possible to build the fire station as designed for the budget available.

“I realize how important it is to Orcas Island and to Deer Harbor, and I tried to come in as slim as possible, and I am still 50 percent over,” he said.

Tye commented on some of the ways the design might be altered to reduce the cost of contruction.

“If you take away some of the detail of the trim, for example, you can really cut costs on labor. It looks cool but it costs money to make it that way,” Tye said.

According to Duke, the commission will now look at how they could reduce costs by redesigning the station, including reducing the size of the structure. The commission will also reevaluate the governmental standards necessary to construct a public works building.

“There are issues we don’t know about, as in certain requirements that we can or cannot change in regards to design,” Duke said.

The commission acknowledged they now had studying to do to find solutions.

“Normally, if it was a really close, or a respectable amount, we could then choose a contractor and work out some solutions to get the numbers in, but our aggregate is $1,078,000 among all bidders. So it’s not that we’re high or low, we’re significantly off,” Duke said.

After the bids were opened and recorded, Chief Mike Harris addressed the contractors present.

“At this point, we need to sit down with our architect and talk about ways we can bring this project back to our budget,” Harris said. “We made a commitment to bring this in at budget and if we have to change what we’re asking you to build in order to do that than that’s what we need to do.”

Ben Trogden, of the Seattle architecture firm who drew the plans, told the Sounder it was too soon to comment on possible revisions.

The commission postponed the groundbreaking ceremony planned for Sept. 22 in Deer Harbor. The BOC work session will still be held on that date at 7:30 p.m. but the location will be the Eastsound fire hall.

The next Orcas Fire Board of Commissioners public meeting is Sept. 8 at 7:30 p.m. at the Eastsound fire hall.