Bids for an overlay project on Gingko Avenue near Wellman were rejected by the Washington County Supervisors at their meeting on Tuesday. 

Washington County Engineer Jacob Thorius presented the bids and recommended the rejection, stating the next steps for the project, “After reviewing the bids and our estimate, things are high, and I am actually going to recommend that you gentlemen reject the bids. We will go through this process again, we will go through the plans, look at them. We think there is some stuff that we specified that increased the costs more and that might not be necessary in terms of where we were putting some work at. Also this would give us the opportunity then to combine it with the rest of the work on the Wellman Road, and let this as one project, and do this over one season instead of two seasons interrupting an entire road. I don’t like rejecting bids, but when they are $600,000 and some over our estimate, that impacts the budget and planned projects. So we need to go back to the drawing board so to speak and revisit that and see if we can adjust things and bring those down. Save some money, which I believe that we will hopefully be able to do.”  

The estimate by the county to do this project was around $2.7 million dollars. A total of seven bids were submitted, and the lowest bid came in 22.9% over the estimate. Thorius stated that they will put an extension on this project and rebid it next January.