City feeling burn as Minto Field turf price soars
$1.1M offer doubles expected cost; company slams bidding process
The price tag to get things right at Minto Field keeps getting higher.
The one company bidding to replace the artificial turf at Minto Field wants more than double the amount of money the city was expecting to pay, prompting a competitor to slam the city for trying to do a sole-source installation.
A request for tenders closed Tuesday afternoon with Centaur Products offering to do the work for $1,178,330 before tax.
The city believed the job would cost about $500,000.
There was likely no other bid because the city already indicated, after tests with sports groups, which turf product it wanted to buy.
Now the city has to decide if it will pay twice as much to install turf, adding to the $1.3 million it paid in 2015 for brand new turf that turned out to be unacceptable for football teams.
“The city is completing a detailed analysis of the bid and is not in a position to discuss the award of the contract at this point,” according to a written statement from the city’s chief procurement officer, William McDonald.
Knoxdale-Merivale Coun. Keith Egli, whose ward includes Minto Field at the Nepean Sportsplex, said he has asked parks management why the bid price is much higher than the initial estimate.
“It appears it may not be accurate,” Egli said of the $500,000 pricing. The city is in a bind. Football teams refuse to play on the current field, which was largely procured as a field hockey surface, and the city is under pressure to have a football-worthy surface ready for the upcoming season.
“We did make a very public commitment in response to a real concern by a large number of parents about the conditions of the existing turf,” Egli said. “We don’t want to go through another season with this turf.”
Egli said his priority is making the field safe for users.
He declined to comment on the procurement strategy by the city to find a replacement turf.
Football players were getting rub burns and scrapes from the turf after the 2015 installation. The city replaced the sand infill with rubber pellets in 2016 hoping they would help soften the surface, but it didn’t work.
Ripping out the brand new field was the only option left.
The city is keeping the padding under the turf, but the playing surface will be swapped out.
Carpell Surfaces won the competitive tender in 2015 to install new artificial turf at Minto Field, replacing the old Astroturf. The company lived up to its end of the deal by installing the artificial turf the city wanted, which was a high-quality turf for field hockey.
In an interview Wednesday, Dominic Deslandes, director of operations for Carpell, said he warned the city that the turf wouldn’t be a suitable multi-sport surface.
When football players started receiving abrasions from the turf, the city realized it wouldn’t work for that sport and started looking for another replacement.
Deslandes said his company could have provided a sample that would have met the city’s requirements for a replacement multi-sport turf, but the city never asked him to participate in a turf test with sports teams.
Instead, the city was focused on a product made by Nexxfield, which received good reviews from football reps.
The Nexxfield product was the only turf the city used for the trial in the winter.
The city said the request for tender specified the Nexxfield XGen Pro Reverse turf product “or an approved equivalent non-infill system.”
Deslandes said the tight procurement window in May made it impossible for him to get a turf product manufactured and put through the battery of tests required by the city.
The city published the bid opportunity on Merx, a major procurement website, on May 24. The deadline for proposals was Tuesday at 3 p.m.
The only bidder, Centaur, is the approved installer for Nexxfield in Ontario.
Deslandes, who said Carpell could do the replacement work for $550,000, believes municipal taxpayers in Ottawa are getting a raw deal because it wasn’t a true competitive tender. He also questions the city’s narrow requirement to have a turf without infill, which is the material between the carpet blades.
“It’s not fair,” Deslandes said. “It’s not fair for the citizens, it’s not fair for the other turf suppliers in Canada. Everything, from my point of view doesn’t make sense.”