Graham park project must be re-bid after too few bids submitted

Graham’s downtown park project hit a setback at 129 West Elm Street when the city opened construction bids and found only two responses, not the three required before North Carolina law allows a contract to move forward.

That means the city must re-bid the work, pushing a project already under pressure from a June 30, 2026, substantial-completion target. Assistant city manager Aaron Holland told council members the new bids are due April 23, leaving Graham to try again just as officials worry that even a short delay could ripple into summer construction schedules.

Only Chadco and CT Wilson Construction submitted bids in the first round. Under state law, public construction contracts covered by G.S. 143-132 require at least three competitive bids after the first advertisement; if fewer than three arrive, the public body must advertise again. Graham’s bid package used a design-build bridging approach, a process that lets a government first hire a design criteria team before selecting a design-builder for the construction phase.

The bidding setback comes after months of controversy over where the park should go and what it would replace. The new site is a city-owned parking lot beside Roasted Coffee Depot and across from The Alamance News. City officials have said the project would eliminate about 25 parking spaces with two-hour limits, and an earlier version of the plan suggested it could remove about half the spaces in the lot.

The lot itself had recently been resurfaced in fiscal year 2023-24 for about $58,500, making the closure a visible change in one of downtown Graham’s most closely watched blocks. Crews had already barricaded the site on April 8 and 9 so Terracon could carry out soil testing for contamination and other underground conditions before construction.

The project also cleared a major local review step only weeks earlier. Graham’s Historic Resources Commission voted 5-0 on March 24 to approve the Certificate of Appropriateness for the park, changing only one visible feature in the plan by flattening the pavilion roof from an A-frame pitch to a flat roof.

The park plan grew out of the city’s fight over Sesquicentennial Park, which was built in 2001 to mark Alamance County’s 150th anniversary in 1999. The Graham City Council voted 4-1 on Jan. 14 to move that park behind the Graham Historical Museum, then shifted again when it approved a third relocation design by a 3-2 vote on March 11.

For Graham, the latest delay is not about whether the park will happen, but how much longer the city must wait, and what that waiting could cost taxpayers if the schedule slips and prices rise again.