YOUNGSTOWN — The city’s board of control agreed to increase by 27.2% the cost of a project to improve the downtown area damaged by the explosion at the former Realty Tower and its subsequent demolition.

The board voted 3-0 Thursday to pay an additional $148,675 to Parella-Pannunzio of Youngstown to repair sections of downtown impacted by the May 28 gas explosion.

The board also unanimously agreed to pay an additional $450,000 to Marucci and Gaffney Excavating Co. of Youngstown for work it did to relocate utility lines under the sidewalks of East and West Federal streets as part of a major downtown improvement project.

That work was delayed for months as a result of the Realty explosion, said Charles Shasho, the city’s deputy director of public works.

“There’s a connection between the two projects because of the explosion,” he said.

Marucci and Gaffney was initially hired three years ago for $15.7 million for improvement work to several downtown streets. The total payment increased by $481,316 because of various change orders and then by $450,000, approved Thursday, for the underground work.

The project’s total cost is at $16.7 million because of $931,316 increases from change orders. But Shasho said there were parts of the project that weren’t done, largely because of the Realty explosion. While it will take several months to work out the final cost, Shasho said he expects it to be lower than its current amount.

Parella-Pannunzio was hired Oct. 24 for $545,717 to do improvement work on Market and East Federal streets in front of and on the side of where Realty Tower used to sit.

East Federal Street from Market to Champion streets were closed from the day of the explosion at the 13-story downtown building until last week.

The work included repairing the roads, sidewalks, utilities, curb ramps, catch basins and landscaping. The landscaping will wait until the spring, Shasho said.

The additional money went to electrical upgrades as well as expanding the sidewalk and curb replacements, Shasho said.

“This was a little bit of a different contract because we didn’t have solid plans to go off of,” he said. “We didn’t know when we bid it what it would entail because a lot of it was covered in debris. These are adjustments. In the event we don’t do this, we’ll deduct it. We still have pavement marking to do, we still have some landscaping to do and decide how much we want to do.”

But the electrical boxes by the former building site “needed to be upgraded,” Shasho said. That work could be done during the winter, depending on the weather, and if not, it will be done in the spring, he said.

A June 14 preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board stated a four-person scrap-removal crew, engaged by GreenHeart Companies of Boardman — owned by Brian Angelili, the managing partner of the company that owned Realty — was working in a basement area underneath the building’s sidewalk removing old utility lines when a crew member sawed three times into a pipe mistakenly believing it to not have natural gas in it. That caused the explosion that killed one and injured nine.

A final report by the NTSB, which is leading the investigation into the explosion, is expected to take one to two years from the explosion date to complete.

Shasho has said the city hired GreenHeart for $140,133 to handle the utility line relocation work at Realty — rather than have Marucci and Gaffney do it — because Angelili owned the building and the company, which does construction, and thought it would be easier for GreenHeart to handle the job.

Marucci and Gaffney were about two weeks away from finishing the Federal Street work when the explosion occurred, Shasho said.

The work wasn’t finished until October, he said.

Marucci and Gaffney was hired in 2021 to do improvement work to Federal, Front, Commerce and Phelps streets as well as Park and Rayen avenues and a small section of Fifth Avenue as part of the second phase of the SMART2 (Strategic and Sustainable, Medical and Manufacturing, Academic and Arts, Residential and Recreation and Technology and Training) Network project.

Parella-Pannunzio did the project’s first phase on Fifth Avenue between West Federal Street and Eastbound Service Road for $7 million from July 2020 to November 2021.

The city received a $10.8 million federal grant in December 2018 for the SMART2 project.

Every single street finished later than scheduled and there were numerous complaints — particularly from business owners on West Federal Street — and the delays and the closings of the streets.

The work included repaving, reducing the number of lanes, widening sidewalks, creating

bicycle paths, lighting upgrades, landscaping and pedestrian islands.