BEND, OR -- Bend City Councilors have approved additional money to finish the design for Galveston Corridor improvements. Wednesday night’s 5-1 vote sends nearly $496,000 more to a project that’s been in the works for more than four years. Councilor Bill Moseley was the lone "no" vote; Councilor Sally Russell recused herself due to a potential conflict of interest because she owns property on NW Galveston Ave.

Project Engineer Garrett Sabourin, with the city, admits the additional money means about 17% of the project’s budget will be spent on design. 

"This is a very complex project, for a transportation project. There are a lot of different infrastructure components; there’s a heavily traveled corridor. There’s – I’ll leave it at, it’s very complex. Our typical process for going through design and our industry standard that we’d like to see with this complexity is more in the 12%-16% range, for design dollars spent." He told Councilors, "Part of that is credited, in my professional opinion, to this start and stop effort that we’ve been doing on this project. Every time we delay things and that we don’t have a continuous project, we lose efficiency. There’s team members who change, there’s ramping up and ramping down; it’s not a continuous effort."

Work on NW Galveston Ave., between Federal St. and Harmon Blvd., is supposed to address pedestrian and bicycle safety and manage storm water with the addition of medians, sidewalks and other improvements. For more on the project, visit the city of Bend's website. It's expected to cost around $3.9 million, although actual construction funds have not yet been allocated.