A shift from bids
District will less often seek sealed proposals for building upgrades
When the Columbus Board of Education approved paying as much as $343,000 to replace a rotted 12-foot-wide wooden cupola atop West High School, that price wasn’t determined through competitive, sealed bids.
Instead, the district used an approach that state law has allowed since 2011 that selects firms based on a scoring system designed to get the “best value” rather than “the strict hard bid,” said Alex Trevino, the district’s director of capital improvements.
The district plans to continue using that system more often as it spends $125 million in bond revenue approved by voters in November for roofs, heating and air-conditioning systems, and other building improvements.
The new system, called “designbuild,” is among options that replaced the old “design-bidbuild” system that was Ohio law for more than 130 years. A major overhaul inserted into a state budget bill six years ago made the new system legal for public agencies, which still have the option to take bids.
Until now, Columbus City Schools almost always required separate sealed bids for electrical work, plumbing, heating-and-cooling systems and general construction.
Before the cupola project, district officials could recall using design-build only on one school computer-lab project. A second designbuild project, for a school heating and ventilating system, goes before the board Tuesday.
For the cupola, the district asked teams to submit their qualifications, and it then scored them in two sections. Price accounted for 40 percent of the score. The remaining 60 percent was determined by three district evaluators who awarded points in categories such as project timeline, staffing, “value-added suggestions” and “unique challenges and solutions.”
The firm with the most total points on the two sections, General Restoration, won the project based largely on its lower guaranteed price of $ 265,000.
But the district has allocated up to $ 343,000 for the cupola, including a contingency for cost overruns, and that total is close to the runner- up’s price of about $350,000. That’s enough cash to buy a 3,000-squarefoot suburban home. Why so much?
“That’s a very good question,” Trevino said.
Three firms initially submitted proposals, but one dropped out.
District spokesman Scott Varner noted that the cupola is “very customized,” must be installed with a crane, probably will be made of steel instead of wood, and might yet come in under budget. “First of all, it’s not done yet,” Varner said.
In the six years since the new non-bid methods became law, no one has conducted a study to see what has happened to prices on public projects.
Craig Weise, chief of projects for the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission,
which oversees the state’s school building program, said the new methods save time, and time is money. But “there is no clear evidence that this is saving a lot of dollars,” Weise said.
Since the legal change, Weise said, the original system of bidding contracts for each system in a new school building under the state’s construction program has gone from 100 percent of projects in 2011 to zero in 2016.
The new systems came about after Ohio State University and other proponents argued that taking competitive bids for multiple building systems slowed projects and resulted in higher prices.
The switch was controversial. Labor unions argued that design- build would be used by non-union firms to keep unions out of projects in the name of speeding up construction and shifting the risk of cost overruns onto a single contractor. The new system gives up a level of transparency, argues Matt Szollosi, executive director of the union trade group ACT Ohio.
Although taking multiple bids took time, “everybody knew the rules,” Szollosi said. “It was a hard- line, bright- line approach. ‘ This is the day and time your bids are required to be submitted. They have to be sealed.’”
Although it is officially against the rules, the new system could allow contractors to “bid shop,” or reveal to certain subcontractors what the lowest bid is so that they can beat it, Szollosi said.
Walter Cates, a longtime local activist who has pushed the Columbus school district to ensure that black residents get jobs and contracts, called the new method “cowardly” because it shifts the awarding of subcontracts from public officials to a private company. Cates said the new system will make it harder for black subcontractors to get district work. His experience has been that the large contractors who have the ability to compete and guarantee entire projects typically have subcontractors they prefer to work with.
“He ain’t coming in without bringing in his own people,” Cates said. “It’s another way to divorce yourself from the protection of the public.”
The new system comes with risks, such as the potential for agencies to use contractor scoring to steer projects, said Peter Hahn, a lawyer specializing in construction law who consults with Columbus City Schools.
But “the ( school) board doesn’t just go into this blindly,” Hahn said; safeguards are built into the system to ensure fairness.