King County officials made an 11th-hour decision earlier this week, enabling the Vashon Park District to save some $100,000 in its effort to finish the VES Fields north of town.

This late-breaking change means that the district will be able to spend $120,000 less than it had recently planned to pave a parking lot at the athletic fields, leaving it as gravel as long as it is used four days a week or less.

This news follows prolonged criticism of the park district for its spending at the fields project, which has cost more than double early projections and now totals $2.5 million, though approximately $1 million has come from grants and donations of money, time and equipment. District officials have been pushing to get final work there done before a construction permit expires and had planned to go into additional debt to cover the costs.

The latest development occurred almost two weeks after park commissioners voted 3-1 to accept a bid from Belfair-based Beasley, Inc. — the only bidder on the project —  to complete the work required by a King County permit. The bid, for nearly $400,000, included about $121,000 to pave the north parking lot, a relatively small lot at the fields complex. Park District Executive Director Elaine Ott had been working for more than a year with county officials to determine exactly what needed to be paved and had repeatedly questioned the north lot.

While Department of Permitting and Environmental Review (DPER) officials had proposed some possibilities to lower the paving costs at the field, their suggestions proved to cost more in the long term or were deemed impractical, Ott noted. After the board’s decision two weeks ago to complete the project this summer, final work was slated to begin this week, in time to complete necessary work before the permit expires in September.

The agreement to leave the parking lot as gravel was made in a Monday morning conference call with Ott, VES project manager Mitch Treese and four King County officials, Ott said. In a conversation with The Beachcomber shortly after that call, she expressed her gratitude to the county staff members involved.

“They are really bending over backwards to accommodate us, and I am so grateful for the all the work they did,” she said.

This type of decision needs to be made in a public board meeting, and Ott said she planned to call an emergency board meeting for Tuesday evening, after press time. She noted she felt confident board members would approve of the decision to leave the lot as gravel.

“This is what we have been fighting for,” she added. “There is no question.”

Reached Monday afternoon, commissioner Scott Harvey, a frequent critic of district spending, had not yet learned about the decision and reacted enthusiastically when informed.

“I am absolutely thrilled,” he said. “It is the best I have felt in two years as a commissioner. … We certainly can use the money. That is a fact.”

At the July 7 board meeting, Harvey had cast the lone dissenting vote against proceeding with the full project, indicating he felt strongly that the district did not have $400,000 more to spend on the fields and that it should fight the county on paving the north lot. He also wanted the board to wait two weeks to vote on the that portion of the project, allowing commissioner Doug Ostrom, who was absent, to discuss the cost and related issues, as well as any community members who may have wanted to weigh in.

“If we had not waived the rules and voted, we would not have to unwind anything now,” he added. “We could have waited. We should have waited.”

Lu-Ann Branch, a commissioner who has served on the board throughout the fields project, had not heard the news either when contacted later that day. She, too, responded enthusiastically.

“That’s awesome,” she said. “I can say I am thrilled. What that effectively does is put $120,000 back in our pockets that we can use for something other than fields.”

At DPER, Jim Chan, the assistant director of permitting, noted that the change in the project will mean that should the district ever want to pave that lot, it will have to apply for a new permit, but for now, the district can make changes to its existing permit, which DPER can address fairly easily and quickly.

“I think we have come to a good solution,” he said.

When contacted last week, before the last-minute solution was proposed, Chan said he felt his department had tried to be helpful, offering to be flexible with timing and informing the park district that it could remove the north lot from the permit by returning it to its native state. The commissioners considered this possibility but did not pursue it in part because parking often overflows to the highway on weekends, a situation that some park district staff and commissioners feel is unsafe. Chan agreed with that assessment.

“Get people off the highway, yes,” he said.

When told the bid amount to complete the project, he expressed surprise at the cost, and a member of his staff then ran calculations on it. For three elements of the project for paving and related work, DPER’s cost estimate totalled just $112,000 compared to Beasley’s $265,000 for those same elements. After being informed of this, Ott said she reached out to Treese and at least one other professional familiar with construction projects on Vashon, who stressed that construction work on Vashon tends to be much higher than in Seattle. Ott added that while nearly $400,000 was higher than anticipated, she did not believe it was as out of line as Chan indicated. A previous bid for the project by an island contractor that was not considered because it was incomplete came in at $316,000, she noted, less than Beasley’s bid, but more than DPER’s calculations. Still, with a permit deadline looming and having bid the project twice, Ott said the district was left with few options.

Adding to challenges, Ott noted that moving ahead with the $400,000 contract would have meant the district would have had to borrow $250,000 from a line of credit with Banner Bank both this year and next, as well as spend its $100,000 reserve this year. On Monday, she had not yet had time to revise her cash flow projections, she said, but noted the new plan would help considerably. The district receives funds from property taxes in April and October, and even with the line of credit, she said she was worried about cash flow next spring.

“March 2016 was looking very dicey. I have been very nervous about that,” she said. “I will sleep better now because of this.”

While the district had not yet signed a contract with Beasley to complete the work, Ott said she had sent it to them, and company officials had told her they had already purchased some materials. She noted there might be some minor financial repercussions for the contract change at this point, but that they would be far less than paying to pave the lot. The district will likely have to tap its line of credit for a small amount this November, but for less than she was anticipating.

“The key thing is we will not have to utilize it as much,” she added. “We would have had to max it out.”

Ott credits King County’s Rural Ombudsman Elizabeth Hill with making Monday’s phone call — and the resulting decision — possible. Ott said she reached out to Hill earlier this summer, after a staff member at DPER suggested she take her concerns up the chain of command.

“This phone call would not have happened if it weren’t for Elizabeth,” she said.

When reached Monday, Hill explained her office helps people in the county come together and work toward solutions. In this case, she said, all those involved, including Chan and the head of the King County Parks Department, arrived at the solution jointly with Vashon Park District staff.

Hill states she is always concerned with there being enough places for kids to play ball, but that she was also concerned about the financial health of the park district in this project.

“I was concerned about the financial challenges,” she said. “I have done a lot of construction management. I understand why it would be important to phase improvements.”

Hill, aware that the fields project has been far costlier than anticipated and has been beset with myriad challenges and controversy over the years, said the project has been a worthy one for the community by providing children more space to play, but then she added what many on Vashon would consider an understatement.

“Capital projects are always difficult,” she said.