Weatherly Borough Council members are hoping a second round of bids will produce lower prices for a long-awaited government complex.

Council voted unanimously Monday night to advertise for new bids on the complex, which would include a new police station, municipal building and magisterial district court located off on the former Tung-Sol Electric property at Plane and West Main streets.

Mayor and council President Tom Connors expressed frustration that the project was first proposed eight years ago and still hasn’t been completed.

Meanwhile, police and borough employees continue to share cramped conditions in a century-old train station, and the magistrate’s office is the only one in the county not adding bulletproof glass as they await a new building.

“If you look at that old school on the hill, it was started in 1900 and finished in 1901. If you look at when we started getting the grants for these buildings, it’s over eight years,” he said.

Over the past five years the borough has assembled about $2 million in grant funds for the project.

Bids came in last month after council authorized a request for proposals in June, and they were higher than expected.

Connors said the two bids that were received were about $600,000 more than the borough’s budget for the project, and that didn’t even include some site work necessary for the project.

Weatherly has proposed three buildings totaling about 14,000 square feet on the 16-acre Tung-Sol property.

The project’s funding includes $1 million from the Pennsylvania Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program, a $600,000 Local Share Account gaming grant, and $475,000 in Economic Development Initiative grant funds, which were given to the county in 2009.

Following the last round of bids, the borough’s engineer, Quad 3 Engineering associates, recommended that council wait until November to get new bids for the project.

Borough Manager Harold Pudliner Jr. echoed that, saying August is a busy time for contractors and prices may be more favorable in the late fall when there is less work available for them.

Councilman Norman Richie, who eventually voted to rebid, was initially hesitant to spend the money to rebid the project.

“Since it’s only three weeks later, I feel we should wait until November instead of wasting a couple thousand on a bid where we may not get bids,” he said.

Connors said council should rebid the project, then consider rearranging the site plan for the project so the buildings are located toward the front part of the property rather than set back off the road, so the cost of site work would decrease.

He also said that he believed that Quad 3 hadn’t done enough to advertise the project.

“Somebody’s saying ‘if you put the bids out in three months, it’ll be cheaper.’ It’s a guess. I don’t think enough people had the opportunity to bid. I don’t think we advertised enough,” Connors said.

He pointed out that the borough did not advertise the bids in either of the two daily newspapers which regularly cover council meetings.

Pudliner said he advertised it in a weekly newspaper based in Weatherly, because he believes most contractors learn about the projects up for bid on industry trade websites, not in the newspaper.

“The bigger contractors are picking off Dodge and some of the other construction websites they have for bidding,” Pudliner said.

Connors said council set out eight years ago to provide a better, safer working environment for their police department and have not yet accomplished that goal.

“It just seems like something is stalling this project. It’s taking too long. Council asked for the plans, after a while they got the plans, then they asked for the bids to go out, why do you want to wait three months?”