Fayette bridges contract debated
While the head of the Fayette County Bridge Department is maintaining that the recently approved bridge inspection contract provides the lowest cost to the county, the project manager for the firm that submitted the lowest bid said he feels his company was “shafted.” Paul Nixon, who heads the bridge department, explained this week that while contract winner Fayette Engineering Co. Inc. did not have the lowest overall bid, it was the lowest cost to the county because the firm agreed to inspect 11 of the county’s 61 bridges for free. The EADS Group of Somerset submitted the lowest overall bid, by more than $40,000, based on inspecting all 61 bridges.
Owen Beachy, project manager for the EADS Group who was involved with bidding the project, said he thought all the county’s 61 bridges were under one program, and the low price got the bid. “If we would have known (the 11 bridges) were a separate animal, we would have bid different. If we would have put the same zero cost (for those bridges as did Fayette Engineering), we would have been lower,” Beachy said.
Beachy said he can’t understand why his company was contacted to submit a proposal and then wasn’t given the contract after submitting the lowest bid. “We didn’t know we were going to get shafted in the end,” he said.
Commission Chairwoman Angela M. Zimmerlink, who voted against the contract, has questioned the logic of approving a contract in which not all the bidders were submitting proposals for the same scope of work.
According to a chart compiled by Nixon from figures obtained from the eight bidders, the total cost to the county for Fayette Engineering under the awarded contract will be $43,899.24. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation will pick up $175,597.23, according to Nixon’s figures. Fayette Engineering’s bid is based on inspection of only 50 bridges, because the firm will inspect the 11 smaller bridges for free. The remaining seven bidders submitted proposals for all 61 county bridges.
Last week, the commissioners voted 2-1 to award a three-year bridge inspection contract to Fayette Engineering of Uniontown for $219,498.47. Commissioners Joseph A. Hardy III and Vincent A. Vicites voted in favor of awarding the contract, while Zimmerlink voted against it.
Hardy and Vicites went with Fayette Engineering, which has handled inspections of the county’s 61 bridges for years, despite the fact that the EADS Group submitted a lower bid of $178,376.47. However, according to Nixon’s figures, the county would have actually paid EADS $13,390 more over the length of the contract, for a total of $57,289.94. PennDOT would have paid $121,086.53 under the EADS bid.
Beachy said the state will pay $50,000 more under the Fayette Engineering contract than it would have paid under the EADS contract. “PennDOT is going to get slammed with the price. It’s not like it’s a free service; they’re making PennDOT pay. Somebody’s paying, it’s just not the commissioners,” Beachy said.
Because the process was based on qualifications and not simply the low bid, Beachy said EADS is not going to push the issue, but PennDOT has been notified of their concerns. Beachy said it isn’t uncommon for the lowest overall bidder not to get the bid, but he said this is the first time in his recollection that there was that significant of a difference and the low bidder didn’t get it. He said the only way something could happen now is if PennDOT doesn’t agree with the reimbursement. “Whatever PennDOT comes up with, we will live with and go on to the next project,” Beachy said.
“The Fayette County commissioners could have simply appointed Fayette Engineering instead of putting out a request for proposals, but we (gave them) proposals we had no chance of getting,” Beachy added. “We knew this would be a competitive bid process but we thought that with the $40,000 swing we would get the bid.”
Vicites, who initially advocated splitting the work among the three lowest bidders in one-year deals before siding with Hardy to select Fayette Engineering, said he favored Fayette Engineering for the contract because it provided the lowest overall cost to the county.
Vicites said the county pays for the bridge inspections out of its liquid fuels budget, which is the only aspect of the contract the county has any control over. He said now the county will have extra money in that fund which can possibly be given to municipalities for other projects.
Zimmerlink said she voted against the motion because she felt that Nixon’s chart “didn’t mathematically made sense.” She said the department head’s calculations only reflected a 20-percent county, 80-percent state cost split using the figure from Fayette Engineering, and she was never told why that same breakdown wasn’t used to derive numbers for the other bidders.
“A detailed review and cost analysis would need to be done before I could say with any certainty that their decision to select Fayette Engineering was a cost savings to the county,” Zimmerlink said. “The county staff needs to improve in this area by giving accurate costs, method of calculations and a clearer explanation of the quotes received and state funding allotted. It is evident that this did not occur in this process.”
The chart supplied by Nixon does not reflect a consistent 20 percent county/80 percent state cost breakdown for all eight bidders. Zimmerlink said she asked Nixon two or three times to explain why there was a difference in the handling of the numbers and she came to the conclusion that it is not a fair comparison. “I would like somebody to tell me why we didn’t go with the lowest bidder,” she said.
Nixon said the discrepancy in the percentages occurred because Fayette Engineering agreed to inspect the county’s 11 bridges that are under 20 feet in diameter for free. He said the county pays the total cost of inspections for any bridges under 20 feet across, but there is a 20-80 percent cost split between the county and state for any bridges more than 20 feet across. However, Russ Mechling, owner of Fayette Engineering, said he believes the cost split for the bridges under 20 feet across is 50-50 percent cost split between the county and state.
During last week’s agenda meeting, in response to a question from Zimmerlink, Nixon said the seven other bidders were not made aware of the fact that Fayette Engineering bid on 50 bridges, instead of 61.
The contract was initially slated for approval earlier this year, but Zimmerlink wanted to have a second request for proposals because there was not a pre-bid conference held the first time around. Vicites said he believed doing an RFP for the service was a “good exercise.”
Nixon also explained that although it is technically a three-year contract, the contract will not end until March 2010 because the bridges are only inspected every other year. Inspectors have until the end of March to inspect the bridges, so the contract is actually for 2006, 2008 and 2010, Nixon said.
While Fayette Engineering is a 20-percent, 80-percent split, evaluating Nixon’s figures, EADS Group breaks down to approximately 32 percent county cost and 68 percent state cost.
According to Nixon’s figures, the other bids were from Pennoni Associates of Brownsville, with a $69,607.97 cost to the county (31 percent) and $158,066.88 cost to state (69 percent), for a total of $227,674.85; Widmer Engineering of Connellsville, $64,550.92 county cost (28 percent) and $169,884.24 state cost (72 percent), for a total of $234,435.16; Erdman Anthony Associates of Mechanicsburg, with a $79,400.20 county cost (32 percent) and $171,212.80 state cost (68 percent), for a total of $250,613; Benatec Associates, of Lemont Furnace, $104,416.64 county cost (31 percent) and $232,821.71 state cost (69 percent), for a total of $337,238.35; Wilbur Smith Associates of Pittsburgh, $112,420.50 county cost (33 percent) and $225,007.95 state cost (66 percent), for a total of $337,428.45; and Mackin Engineering of Pittsburgh, $127,053.48 county cost (32 percent) and $266,663.41 state cost (67 percent), for a total of $393,716.89.