President Trump said his chosen contractor would only charge $1.8 million to repair and paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue.
After the Interior Department nearly doubled the size of the contract late last week, the actual cost is now more than seven times higher, federal records show.
On Friday, the Interior Department added $6.2 million to the previous cost of the contract, and said it now planned to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. President Trump said he chose that company to renovate the historic site because the company had worked on the swimming pool at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia.
The government awarded the no-bid contract to the firm last month, bypassing the need to seek competitive proposals, saying the situation was so urgent that any delay would “severely hurt” the government. The government has not publicly disclosed what that injury might have been.
Instead, it has cited Mr Trump’s desire to complete the work before the country’s 250th birthday on July 4.
Public contract records do not explain why the cost of the contract rose so sharply on Friday. Interior Department spokeswoman Katie Martin said the higher price “reflects the effort required to accelerate the timeline for completing the leak prevention coating project – more people, more material, more equipment and longer hours before our 250th.”
Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to questions about the increase.
But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that the current value of the contract, dollar-wise, matches an offer submitted to the government by Atlantic Industrial Coatings mid-last month. That offer included a 20 percent profit margin, documents show.
Competitive bidding laws are intended to ensure that the government is getting a fair price from its vendors.
The contractor was hired to repair the leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom, and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”
The pool has also suffered from decades of leaks and algae blooms that turn its water green.
On Monday, a nonprofit dedicated to landscape architecture filed a lawsuit A demand has been filed in the US District Court in Washington to stop the paint work. The Cultural Landscape Foundation said the Trump administration has ignored a law requiring advance scrutiny of projects that alter historic sites.
The Washington-based foundation said in its lawsuit that “each day that resurgence continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered.”
