The Chilmark School will not be getting its decrepit heating and cooling system replaced this summer. On Monday the up-Island school committee heard from district finance director Mark Friedman that the sole bid for the work has come in at $1.87 million — steeply higher than budgeted, he said.

“We were projecting we had a budget of $1.26 million ,” Mr. Friedman said. That includes $950,000 the district is approved to borrow, plus leftover voter-endorsed funding from prior town meeting warrants and money from the town of Chilmark’s Green Communities fund, he said.

“The math on that means we are a little over $600,000 shy of being able to sign a contract,” he said.

The general contractor portion of the bid alone, not including the specialized trades, was $750,000 — close to three times what the district was expecting, Mr. Friedman said.

“It wasn’t a competitive bid, in my opinion, but that’s what we got,” he said. “We are challenged with having very few folks, very few firms interested in this project.”

The district, working with the owner’s project manager for the HVAC replacement, is still trying to figure out how to proceed, Mr. Friedman said.

“It’s a challenging time to try to do projects right now,” he said.

“Included in our budget .. there was a 15 per cent contingency [for unexpected costs] in there, but the market conditions are such that even that contingency wasn’t nearly enough.”

There are other reasons the request for bids will need to be restructured before it’s issued again, Mr. Friedman told the committee.

“Some aspects of the [Massachusetts] procurement laws . . . don’t make it easy to just keep going out and re-bidding the exact same project because you don’t like the bids you are receiving,” he said.

Another obstacle Mr. Friedman cited was the narrow time period specified for the project, which includes demolition, installation and restoration. It can’t begin until after classes end in June and must be finished by the start of school in September.

“It’s just not enough time for us to get a reasonable bid, particularly when we’re also hearing across the spectrum that . . . most contractors are expecting equipment delays, and we had liquidated damages as part of this bid,” he said.

Liquidated damages are fees deducted from the contractor’s pay for every day a project continues past its agreed completion date.

“Our terms are so aggressive that we’re not, in return, eliciting competitive responses,” Mr. Friedman said.

“We’ve gone out to bid multiple times on this and we still keep coming back well over our budgeted resources,” he continued. “We keep only getting one bidder or so . . . and they’re not even close to being in the range where we can come back to [the school committee for review].”

Having the HVAC work done during the school year may be more appealing to contractors, but would force the displacement of students and teachers, Mr. Friedman said.

Another avenue the district is discussing with its owner’s project manager would involve segmenting the HVAC work.

“We’re . . . exploring if we can do it legally in pieces,” Mr. Friedman said. “We’re trying to see if there’s a way.”

Promising an update within the next few weeks, Mr. Friedman cautioned the committee that it will be a challenging process.

“It’s not an easy thing to deconstruct and put in different parts, but that’s what we’re looking at right now,” he said.