Graham Construction & Management Inc., of Spokane, says it has been awarded contracts for, or is the apparent low bidder on, projects worth more than $20 million scattered across the Northwest.


Projects for which it recently has been named the general contractor include the construction of a new Walgreen Co. store in Walla Walla, at $1.7 million, and a $700,000 fast-track renovation of the Safeway Inc. supermarket at 121 W. Neider in north Coeur dAlene, says Larry Wiberg, company president.


Projects on which Graham is the apparent low bidder and is waiting to receive a contract award include the construction of an allied health and sciences building at Wenatchee Valley College in Wenatchee, at $15.3 million, and construction of a new veterinary barn complex on Washington State University campus in Pullman, at $1.6 million.


As a subcontractor, it also has garnered a roughly $2 million portion of a $14 million waste-water treatment plant project in Sunnyside, Wash., for the construction of a concrete building.


Scott Jutte, Grahams project manager overseeing the Walgreen drug store construction, says Graham expects to begin work on that project in early September and complete it by about mid-February.


The building will be a 14,500-square-foot structure, Tuttle says.


Graham already has begun work on the 54-day Safeway project in Coeur dAlene, which includes making extensive interior and some exterior upgrades, Jutte says. The project is on an accelerated schedule, and most of the work is being done at night, to minimize its negative impact on sales at the store, which is open 24 hours a day.


One of the biggest looming potential projects for Graham is the Wenatchee Valley College building, which is to be a three-story structure with a basement, comprising 80,600 square feet of floor space. Integrus Architecture PS, of Spokane, designed the building.


The college has scheduled a groundbreaking ceremony for the building for next week, and Wiberg says that Grahamassuming its awarded the construction contractprobably will begin work on the project within 30 days. The project is expected to take about 20 months to complete.


At WSU in Pullman, Graham is awaiting the award of a contract to erect a 12,000-square-foot teaching barn, a 10,000-square-foot research barn, paddocks, and support structures for use by the College of Veterinary Sciences.


Those activities, currently located in older structures on the northeast periphery of the WSU campus, must be relocated to make room for an 18-hole golf course the university plans to develop, says project officer Louise Sweeney, of WSU.


The new teaching barn will be a pre-manufactured steel structure and will be erected, along with a couple of support structures, on whats called the Carver Farm site on the south side of campus near the Moscow-Pullman highway, Sweeney says. The research barn, meanwhile, will be a pole building and will be erected near the northeast corner of campus, just across Airport Road from the old research barns location, she says.


A contract for the WSU project should be awarded in the next month or so, with construction probably beginning around mid-September and continuing through February, she says.


WSU will seek to auction off the old metal building that currently serves as the veterinary research barn and plans to convert the wood building that serves as the teaching barn into a maintenance facility for the golf course, Sweeney says.


The planned golf course is expected to cost about $8.5 million to develop and will be located on 300 acres of land the university owns, she says. The university already operates a nine-hole course on part of that land, but its layout will be reconfigured.


The university hopes to solicit bids for the golf-course project in January and to open the course by the fall of 2007, but the project will be funded entirely with private donations, and the university is seeking donors for it now, Sweeney says. Plans for a clubhouse for the course havent been worked out yet, she says.


Meanwhile, also outside of the Spokane area, Graham is continuing work on several large bridge projectstotaling more that $12 millionthat it was awarded earlier in the Tri-Cities and Puget Sound areas.


In the Tri-Cities, its building one bridge and widening another as a structures-package subcontractor on a larger transportation-improvement project thats expected to cost about $35 million overall, says Paul Clary, manager of Grahams civil department.


Grahams portion of the project, worth about $5 million, includes constructing a new 145-foot-long bridge to carry state Route 240 over the Columbia Park Trail in Kennewick and widening a 412-foot-long bridge where the highway goes over Interstate 182, Clary says. It began work on those projects around June 1 and expects to finish in January, he says.


Separately, in Arlington, Wash., north of Everett, Graham is constructing a six-lane bridge to carry 172nd Street over Interstate 5. It was awarded a $7.2 million contract for the project last year. The new bridge will replace one that only had one traffic lane in each direction.


To keep the heavy traffic there flowing, that project has required building about a third of the new bridge, then tearing down the adjacent old bridge, before completing the new span, he says. Construction of the latter two-thirds of the new bridge now is well along, and the project is expected to be completed in October, Clary says.


Graham Construction & Management, formerly called Shea Graham Construction Inc., is the Spokane affiliate of Graham Group Ltd., a large Calgary, Alberta-based construction conglomerate with a number of affiliate offices in Canada and the U.S. Graham Group formed Shea Graham Construction here in late 2001 after buying the assets of Shea Construction Inc., a longtime general contractor here.


Following that transaction, David Shea, founder and president of Shea Construction, worked for a time in business development for Graham Groups U.S. operations, but since then has left the company. Graham Group also has an operation in Seattle, called Graham Contracting, but the Arlington bridge project on that side of the state is being handled by the Spokane office.