By CRAIG FREILICH

POTSDAM -- The Board of Trustees has awarded $13 million in contracts for rebuilding the village’s water treatment plant for much more money than the original $10 million estimate from engineering consultants.

The general contractor will be Blue Heron Construction Co. LLC, based in Virginia and with an office in Jordan, N.Y., whose bid was $9,753,500.

The heating and ventilation contract went to Burns Bros. Contractors of Syracuse whose Potsdam office bid $1,378,000.

The contract for electrical work was awarded to Watson Electric of Norwood for $1,805,624.

The vote on the awarding of the contracts was unanimous with trustees Steve Warr, Abby Lee and Nick Sheehan voting in favor.

Trustee Warr said he was very disappointed in the performance of engineering consultants Barton & Loguidice, whose estimate of the cost was well below what bidders put forward.

Warr was also critical of the consultants for not making it clear to the board that a company that Trustee Sheehan works for, J.E Sheehan Construction of Potsdam, would be ineligible because of his position on the board.

He said Barton & Loguidice was “two strikes down” in his estimation for those two reasons.

He said the consultants had “grossly underestimated” the bids the village received.

Warr said that had they made it clear earlier that his position on the board would be considered a conflict of interest in the bidding, Trustee Sheehan might have decided not to run for trustee.

Sheehan Construction is a very active developer in the region, winning sizeable local and regional contracts with regularity.

The consultants “did not handle these parts of the project correctly,” Warr said.

He suggested that a system of two standards, one for urban areas and one for smaller communities, might work better than the current rules because smaller communities find it more difficult to avoid conflict of interest situations such as this one.

“There should be special provisions for rural areas” because the contracting business is very different in Albany, Rochester and Buffalo than it is here, he said. “It’s just wrong.”

The current law “might be a matter of fact, but for us it’s personal,” because the Sheehan company was a low bidder and missed out on a large contract.