After more than a year of mediation, Western and Ebenal General Inc., the contractor for Buchanan Towers East, have reached a settlement.

Paul Cocke, director of University Communications, said the university chose to settle to avoid months of continued legal fees.

“There are no real winners in this,” Cocke said. “This was a business decision by the university to avoid this dragging on for months, taking up a ton of staff time and maybe costing hundreds of thousands of dollars more.”

Students were able to move in to BT East this fall, after delays and complaints about the quality of work led the university to fire the original contractor. The parties have been trying to reach a settlement since January 2011.

Western paid almost $2 million to Safeco Insurance Company of America in the settlement. This brings the total paid to Ebenal General Inc. and its insurance company to about $10 million — $200,000 more than the university planned.

The project was paid for using a bond, which will be paid off with students’ room and board over the next 20 years. No money from tuition or the state was used for the project, said Richard Van Den Hul, vice president for Business and Financial Affairs at Western.

The construction project began in June 2009, and was supposed to be completed by August 2010.

After the deadline passed and the building was nowhere near finished, the university began to withhold payment for “items that were not completed appropriately,” Van Den Hul said.   

About six months after the due date passed, in February 2011, the university ended its contract with Ebenal General Inc. Since then, the parties have been battling over payments.

David Ebenal, owner of the contracting company, was billing for almost $5 million more than the $9.8 million contract the university agreed upon, Van Den Hul said.

“At the end of the day, we had to make a business decision,” Van Den Hul said. “They were asking for $13.5 million dollars, and in the end we settled on an amount we were willing to pay.”

Ebenal wrote in a blog post on his company’s website that he “considers the settlement a victory.” He could not be reached for comment by press time.

The university spent a total of $15.1 million in the planning, construction and furnishing of BT East and the surrounding facilities, Van Den Hul said. The building is five stories tall, with 25 suites and 105 beds.

 In the same blog post, Ebenal describes the project as “lavish.”

“The finishes in these college dorm rooms rival the finest custom homes in Bellingham,” he wrote.

Western sophomore Melodi Yanik’s fifth-floor suite in BT East has three rooms and five people.

“It’s brand new, so it definitely looks modern,” she said. “There’s gigantic windows to take in all the sunshine and it really doesn’t remind you of the dorms that are just two closets and two beds. It’s definitely more home-style.”

But living in BT East isn’t entirely perfect, Yanik said. She has had issues with electrical plugs not working properly and has noticed other imperfections.

“Our floors aren’t level,” she said. “If you pay attention when you’re walking on the floor, you can feel these little lumps. But it’s not an issue.”

Willy Hart, director of University Residences, said the buildings are designed to be durable in order to keep up with the influx of students living in them.

“We keep these buildings for 50, 60, 70 years and a few hundred students live in those buildings every year, so they get lived in pretty well,” Hart said. “It’s not a whole bunch of senior citizens watching TV with the remote.”

The university will be paying off the bond for about 20 years using money from students’ room and board and on-campus food purchases, Hart said.

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