The Washington state Department of Transportation has awarded to Spokane-based Garco Construction Inc. an $8.7 million contract to build a new North Central Region Administration building in Wenatchee.

Rich Wagner, a project manager for Garco, says the company was selected in October to build the new facility, which will consolidate the department’s regional administrative offices and its project engineering offices. 

“Demolition of the old project engineering offices will start sometime in December, and the project is set to reach completion by March of 2018,” he says.

Jim Rodgers, a project manager for WSDOT, says Bernardo|Wills Architects PC, of Spokane, is working on the design for the building, which is planned to be two stories with a total of 30,000 square feet of space located at 2830 Euclid, at the north end of the city. 

Rodgers says the Euclid Avenue site is a 20-acre parcel of land that includes five buildings, including the department’s Area 1 headquarters, a consolidated shops building, an equipment storage building, and two modular offices used by its project engineering department. 

“This project is the final phase of a master plan buildout for the Euclid Avenue site, which began in the 1980s,” he says. “We’ve just started design and hope to break ground on construction by March 2017.”  

He says the modular offices that are to be demolished total about 10,000 square feet of space. 

Rodgers says a demolition contract for those buildings is expected to be awarded soon.

He says the employees from those project engineering offices already have moved from that site to unused buildings at the department’s current Wenatchee headquarters site, four miles away at 1551 Wenatchee. That 6.5-acre site has a 6,200-square-foot building, where the department’s area administrative offices are located, and a 16,600-square-foot shop and materials lab building. 

Because that building is older and would cost too much to renovate, the administrative offices also will be moving into the new building on Euclid once it’s completed. 

 “This project will move all department functions to the Euclid Avenue site, consolidating all of our activities in Wenatchee,” says Rodgers. 

Jeff Adamson, communications director with the North Central Regional office, says the department is considering selling the Wenatchee Avenue property back to the city, which has expressed interest in redeveloping it.

“The city of Wenatchee would like to develop that site, and we’d like to move into a building more suited to our needs,” says Adamson. “Having admin and project engineering staff in the same building is going to result in a much more efficient operation.”

Additionally, he says, the Euclid Avenue site is close to a Washington State Patrol communications facility, so the department’s traffic management center can continue to work closely with the WSP on projects relating to transportation.