Oyster Bay spends $900G more on garage

The Town of Oyster Bay is spending an additional $928,777 on its new Hicksville parking garage — an amount officials say was budgeted in the project’s original construction contract.

Town board members on Tuesday approved a change order for builder Peter Scalamandre & Sons of Freeport. The work, including $320,000 for an anti-corrosion application, is typical of late-stage additions made to large projects, said Town Attorney Len Genova.

It is unrelated, he added, to water leaks the new garage experienced in its first days in March and April. The 1,440-space garage near the Hicksville Long Island Rail Road station took 14 months to complete, and is the town’s largest project in several years.

The original contract with Scalamandre was $33.1 million, with an additional 10 percent budgeted for increases like the one approved this week. Because of that, Genova said, the town is still within the contract’s $36.4-million maximum.

Including earlier costs of demolishing the old, decaying garage on site and making area road improvements, the town has spent about $60 million to restore covered parking for commuters in Hicksville, one of Long Island’s busiest transit hubs.