Work on a new transportation center for the Tahoma School District is nearing completion and officials hope the bus barn will be open before school starts.

Lori Cloud, director of finance and operations for the district, said construction crews are well into phase two of work which began in March and cost about $2.5 million.

“We’ve got the transportation maintenance facility and the transportation dispatch building going up,” Cloud said. “Everything is going really smoothly.”

This new transportation center has been a long time coming for the district.

For more than a decade district officials tried to find a spot for a new bus barn, but either the site wasn’t right or the money wasn’t there to pay for it. The district settled on a site off Petrovitsky Road Southeast near Shadow Lake Elementary School in 2006.

Cloud said that with the last bond issues the district had money set aside to build the transportation center.

“They didn’t want to commit those funds to the transportation center until all the other projects were completed,” Cloud said. “They waited until the very end of all the projects. So, after the junior high and Tahoma Middle School remodels were finished, they went ahead.”

In the late 1980s money was set aside from a bond measure to build the bus barn but it was diverted to build another wing at Glacier Park Elementary which was growing rapidly at the time.

Since then district officials have been looking for a way to build a new transportation center.

In 1989, the district decided it needed to do something because the maintenance garage for the buses just doesn’t work. An old storage shed was converted to a maintenance building which doesn’t have lifts for mechanics to work on the buses.

School buses currently live at the old Tahoma Elementary School site, which is also home to Maple Valley High School and the district’s maintenance staff.

“We’re fine where we are right now with the old facility but our goal is to have everybody moved in before school starts,” Cloud said.

The old transportation center is a small, crowded site. Bus drivers have to arrive early in the morning to get a parking spot before they start work. It’s also on a hillside just off Southeast 216th, which even if it could be revamped, would require drainage ponds.

The site for the new transportation center covers 17 acres. There is paved parking for 80 buses, which is a few more than what the district uses now to transport 68 percent of its students. There will also be a state-of-the-art maintenance garage where up to four buses can be worked on at a time.

In addition, there will be more space for administrative staff, as well as meeting space and more room for parking for drivers. Cloud said there are 42 full-time equivalent employees who will work there, including three mechanics and four and a half office staff.

“The main thing is the size of the facility so we’ll be able to park all the buses,” Cloud said. “It’ll be paved where right now they’re on dirt, so we’ll be able to keep the buses cleaner, and we’ll have a bus wash on site. The maintenance facility is much improved over what we have right now.”

And the staff who work there can’t wait to move into the new center.

“They’re pumped,” Cloud said. “They’re excited. I would say there’s probably a weekly, if not daily, field trip to go over there to look at from the maintenance staff to the drivers to the dispatchers.”