As the Steamship Authority nears two years of off-season construction at its Woods Hole terminal, costs for the project have surpassed $70 million, boat line general manager Robert Davis confirmed this week.
“It’s north of $70 million, yes,” said Mr. Davis, who was on the Vineyard to attend a Tisbury selectmen’s meeting Wednesday.
Begun in early 2018, the massive shoreside reconstruction project includes three ferry slips, two passenger piers, a ticket building and a reconfigured parking lot, among other changes to the Woods Hole terminal.
Construction work is suspended during the summer months. Projected in late 2017 to be completed over the next six years, the reconstruction has more than three years still to go, architect Chris Iwerks told SSA governors in November.
Contractor Jay Cashman Inc. of Quincy is working on one slip at a time in order to leave the terminal’s other two berths available for ferries.
This winter, Cashman has been rebuilding the middle slip, using powerful machine hammers to drive large pilings up to 100 feet into the soil beneath the water’s surface.
Cashman has also been using a ringer crane, based on a 160-foot-long barge, to lift the pilings from a smaller barge into position for driving.
The barges are located so close to the operational slips that SSA vessels have scraped them at least twice. In some wind and water conditions, ferry captains have canceled trips rather than try to maneuver past the barges.
The SSA is now down to a single slip for the next three weeks, as Cashman prepares to remove some of the barged equipment using the middle slip as a staging area. The boat line has issued a schedule update and said some trips may run up to 10 minutes late.
It’s not clear by how much the total price tag for the Woods Hole terminal reconstruction has exceeded original estimates.
Early this week the Gazette requested a detailed breakdown of costs to date on the project, but the boat line said it could not have the numbers ready by press time Thursday.
In 2015, SSA senior managers said at a meeting on the Vineyard that the project could cost as much as $68 million.
Later estimates brought the total closer to $64 million, but the preliminary number is coming nearer to the mark.
Speaking briefly to the Gazette before the Tisbury meeting Wednesday, Mr. Davis said a number of factors have contributed to increased expenses, including relocating the SSA’s administrative offices to a new building in Falmouth.
A prolonged design process for a new ticket office has also contributed to pushing up costs. Architects created more than two dozen different site plans for the terminal before a final version was selected, and are still developing a ticket building design after two years of often contentious public review.
Led by Woods Hole villagers and business owners, residents of Falmouth and the Vineyard alike persistently opposed a series of two-story building designs submitted between 2017 and 2019 by architects BIA.studio of Boston.
Last November, SSA governors approved a single-story concept with a
two-story utility building nearby.
Changes in the design concept up to that point had cost the boat line about $750,000, Mr. Davis told the board at that meeting.
Keeping the temporary terminal building, which opened to the public in late 2017, is not an option because the $2.6 million structure is not eligible for a permanent building permit, boat line officials have said.
The old terminal building, originally a loading shed for railroad freight in the 1950s, was demolished in March 2018, about a month behind schedule due to delays in completing the new administrative building on Palmer Avenue in Falmouth.
The new third slip is taking the place of the old building, while the future ticket office will be built on the spot currently occupied by the temporary building.
Construction work is set to continue through mid-May, at which point Cashman will withdraw its heavy equipment and materials until the fall.
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