SAN MARCOS ---- The San Diego company of C.E. Wylie is the apparent low bidder for the first permanent new home of the College of Business Administration at Cal State San Marcos, but the bid came in $751,000 higher than the $19.75 million allocated for construction.

Wylie's bid was $20.5 million.

University officials, however, said there are ways to get the new building up and within budget. They expect to award the job to Wylie within the next four weeks.

The four-story, nearly 80,000-square-foot building, slated for completion by January 2006, would add classroom space to the campus for some 3,150 students and offices for about 90 faculty members. The $19.75 million earmarked for construction makes up most of the estimated final price tag of $27.9 million, a figure that adds in such costs as architectural fees.

The funds are coming from the state of California under a post-Sept. 11, 2001, economic stimulus package of $651 million proposed by then-Gov. Gray Davis.

The bids were unsealed Thursday afternoon at the CSUSM finance offices on Rancheros Drive. Campus architect Diane Malone said university officials were pleasantly surprised.

She said officials had been worried that bids would come in higher than they did because costs for labor and for commodities such as steel and drywall have been on the rise.

"The prices are quite high and it had us shaking in our shoes," Malone said in announcing the bid results. "So we're very happy about this and we are very optimistic. The fact is that we have been hearing such horror stories about bid spikes that we really feel like we can manage with this."

C.E. Wylie was one of six bidders for the job. The highest bid, from D.E. Barnhart, came in at $21.79 million, or $1.3 million higher than Wylie.

Wylie's projects in North County include a new $9 million middle school in Carlsbad called Calavera Hills, a $10 million modernization at Vista High School and the $10 million to $15 million Twin Oaks Valley diversion structure project in San Marcos for the San Diego County Water Authority.

At Wylie, a receptionist said no one would be reachable for comment Friday afternoon.

College of Business Administration Dean Dennis Guseman said he continued to be "very optimistic" that a "nice building" will be built as planned. Guseman said he was pleased that the feared "extremely high" bids "just came in a little high."

Malone, the campus architect, said that there are ways to cover the $751,000 gap between the allocated cost and the low bid. These steps could include scaling back landscaping plans, deferring the finished flooring in some less-used parts of the building and putting off buying the desks for the classrooms designed for case studies.

Aside from Barnhart's $21.79 million bid, S.J. Amoroso of Redwood Shores filed a bid at $20.65 million; Solpac of San Diego at $20.96 million; Highland Construction, which was the general contractor for the new Kellogg Library, at $21.59 million; and Swinerton and Walberg of San Diego at $21.65 million.

Cal State San Marcos officials have said they expect the new space to meet the university's needs for business education for 10 to 20 more years. Business is the most popular major at the university, pursued by about one in five of the more than 7,500 students enrolled at CSUSM.

On the drawing board since 1999, the business building would be flanked by Academic Hall and University Hall, completing a triangle there and facing the Palm Court.