MOSES LAKE - Construction could begin as early as December on a facility designed to offer technical skills training to high school students in Grant County and some portions of Adams County.

The Moses Lake School Board awarded the construction contract for the Columbia Basin Skills Center to Fowler Construction, Tri-Cities, at a special board meeting Tuesday. Fowler bid $13,199,838 to build the skills center; the contract includes the original building, two classrooms not in the original design and a solar array designed to generate electricity. An option that would've paved a bigger space in the parking lot was eliminated.

Skills center programs will be open to high school students in Moses Lake, Ephrata, Wilson Creek, Quincy, Lake Roosevelt (Grand Coulee), Royal, Warden, Soap Lake and Coulee-Hartline in Grant County and Othello in Adams County.

Principal architect Brent Harding said the goal is to have the contract prepared and signed during the next two weeks, and groundbreaking could happen in December. Completion is projected for spring 2014, and Moses Lake district officials want to offer a 2014 summer school course there, said Superintendent Michelle Price. The skills center will open for regular classes in fall 2014.

The program will include classes in culinary arts, pre-engineering, construction, design, manufacturing, welding, pre-nursing and other medical careers. The two additional classrooms could mean additional programs, but board member Connie Opheikens said no decisions have been made about curriculum expansion.

Building a skills center has been an object of discussion for more than a quarter-century. "We were talking about it in 1985," Opheikens said. Board member Vicki Groff said there are records showing district officials working on it since the 1970s.

John Aultman, of Olympia, who is the district's consultant on the project, used to manage other skills centers in the state. He said state officials have been pursuing the skills center idea since the mid-1980s, but building and maintaining the program is expensive, so expansion has been slow. State officials have determined it's more cost-effective to build the building in a central location and have students commute to it, Aultman said.