WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — A flawed design process is responsible for the $1.3 million overrun in a 2.4-mile bicycle and pedestrian path built under the auspices of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the town manager said this month.

 

The town is on the hook for that $1.3 million, which exceeds the 10 percent contingency that MassDOT built into the budget for a multimodal trail bid at around $5.3 million.

 

At a meeting of the town's Finance Committee this month, Town Manager Robert Menicocci gave his most detailed public explanation of how the project's cost came in so far above the $5.8 million that the state agency contributed.

 

"There are two programmatic pieces as part of the project that fall into the category of: In a perfect world, maybe it wouldn't have happened," Menicocci said. "One I think was the overall bid and design, which related to the fact that, a lot of time, these trails are put in on existing rail beds, and you know what you're going on. There is solid earth underneath you. And a lot of the area where our bike path went in, there was wetland underneath and relatively virgin land.