PORT ANGELES — A city consultant on the effort to stabilize a failing west Port Angeles bluff holding back the city’s defunct landfill will be paid an additional $931,000 to complete design work and submit the necessary local, state and federal permits by August.

City Council members voted 6-1 Tuesday night, with Councilman Max Mania opposed, to approve the $931,000 amendment to the city’s contract with Seattle-based Herrera Environmental Consultants, increasing the total contract amount from about $1.6 million to roughly $2.5 million.

Herrera has been contracted to design a way to keep decades of accumulated waste in the city’s inactive landfill on the west end of 18th Street from falling into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

City public works staff have said the 135-foot-high bluff north of the landfill, which the city operated from 1979 to 2007, is as thin as 11 feet in some places.

The project aims to move about 250,000 cubic yards of buried waste from near the edge of the bluff just south to another part of the landfill and reinforce a seawall built at the toe of the bluff, City Engineering Manager Kathryn Neal told council members Tuesday.

Cost could change

Neal said the entire cost of the project, including design and eventual construction, would be about $17.5 million, though she cautioned that that figure could change once the project reaches the construction phase.

“Realistically, we won’t know the true construction costs until we open bids,” Neal said. “We still have to have that caveat.”

Neal said the project will require several separate permits, including from Clallam County, the Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Ecology, all of which Herrera expects to have submitted by August.

City public works staff want construction on the stabilization project to begin by summer 2014.

Ecology has promised emergency financial assistance for the project to the tune of $3.9 million, an amount the city will not have to pay back, city officials have said.

The project also will install woody debris near the mouth of Dry Creek, the mouth of which is just west of the landfill bluff, Neal said, to keep the creek on its course and prevent it from eroding the bluff.

Neal said this work also will serve a habitat restoration purpose and was designed with input from Mike McHenry, a habitat biologist for the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe.

“The concept here is to do something a little bit more fish-friendly,” Neal said.

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Reporter Jeremy Schwartz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jschwartz@peninsuladailynews.com.