Fatal flaws, five times over.
That’s the reason why the city will have to restart its efforts to get bids from construction companies who want to take on the next piece of the Sound to Olympics Trail project.
Bainbridge Public Works Director Barry Loveless said this week each of the five bids received for the multi-million dollar project contained paperwork problems that wouldn’t pass muster with the federal government.
Bids for the project were opened Aug. 16, but Loveless said the bids were found to have flaws and shouldn’t be accepted.
City officials had
expected to award the bid to Port Madison Enterprises, for $2,214,864.
This piece of the Sound to Olympics Trail covers just short of a mile of the route, between Winslow Way and High School Road, as it heads north along Highway 305. The work included a pedestrian/bicycle bridge over the highway at Ravine Creek, as well as retainment walls, landscaping, paint striping, signs and other improvements.
At Tuesday’s city council meeting, Loveless said the city should rework the bidding package and send it back out.
“We’re recommending: Reject all bids and rebid,” he told the council.
With a 6-0 vote, the council agreed. (Councilman Mike Scott was absent.)
All of the bids received came in higher than the city engineer’s estimate for the project, which was $2,032,251.
Port Madison Enterprises had been the lowest bidder.
The other companies submitting bids were IO Environmental ($2,693,617), Massana Construction ($2,409,564), Redside Construction ($2,496,674) and Quigg ($2,449,924).
The amount of the bids had prompted the city to seek a $250,000 budget amendment to cover the cost of the project.
Even so, much of the work would be funded by the federal government, and the city learned in 2013 it had received a $1.6 million grant to help pay for the project.
Loveless said a “very, very minor technicality” was found with the bid from Port Madison Enterprises, and other bids had to be rejected due to what the Washington Department of Transportation considers “non-responsiveness,” which meant some bidders did not include needed information on subcontractors on specific pages of their submittals, although those details were included elsewhere in the bids.
Starting over will allow the city to look at the elements of the project with a view toward cost savings, Loveless said, and give officials a chance to streamline the bid notice to remove alternates bids that include additional improvements on that piece of the Sound to Olympics Trail.
The city expects to put the project back out to bid in the near future.
