All bids denied for Almond Street project

The Paradise Town Council on Tuesday morning voted 5- 0 to deny all bids in connection with the Almond Tree project.

Town Engineer Marc Mattox said that the main motivation was to shorten construction time to six months, instead of the twoyear project that the three previous bids had been on.

Maddox said all six bids in the latest process were below the engineer’s estimate, which Mattox said was a good thing. Prior to that vote, Town Councilwomen Rose Tryon and Jody Jones aired concerns that rejecting the third bid would harm the town’s reputation.

“My concern is that the companies in good faith have bid this twice already,” Jones told Mattox. “It’s not really a good thing to make them bid it three times, we start losing our credibility.”

Mattox told Jones that he understood the sentiment but that a project of this size that Paradise is looking to build, it is normal for there to be several bid cycles.

Maddox said that in his discussions with contractors there’s no concern of a third bid cycle because they wanted to help rebuild Paradise.

“It is frustrating, “Maddox said. “I will admit that, for sure.”

There was also a challenge to the low bid, but Mattox said that was a consideration for denial but the main reason was reducing the construction time.

Councilman Steve Culleton said he wasn’t concerned about rebuilding a third time, saying the town’s reputation is just fine. His concern was what would happen if the low bidder doesn’t win the bid the third time around.

Mattox said that there is no cost to the town to do a third bidding cycle adding that if a rejection of all bids happened a third time in February when the bid recommendation is supposed to be presented to counsel, Mattox said his recommendations might be different than the one he made last night.

Mattox told the council that when the Almond Street project was first proposed in 2016, the town was going to have to use some Measure C funds to rehabilitate the roads in the area.

He told the council that the plan is to back out those roads in that area from FEMA claim and use other funds to pay for that.

Project construction is set to start the end of late March and early April with the project’s completion later in 2021.