Councilor protests bid awarded to mayor’s company
Council OKs contract despite Wright’s concerns
Companies that employ members of the council shouldn’t do business with the city, according to one councilman.
Specifically signaling Mayor Doug Nicholls, who owns Core Engineering Group, Councilor Gary Wright voted against a contract that authorized the city administrator to negotiate and execute a one-year contract for on-call professional engineering consultant services.
With a 5-1 vote, the council awarded the contract to 10 firms, including the mayor’s company, during Wednesday’s regular meeting. Nicholls recused himself and left the Council Chambers before discussion of the agenda item, citing a conflict of interest.
“I have deep concerns about this list,” Wright said.
He explained that he believes an elected official should not be doing any work on the Capital Improvement Program, which is the city’s plan for the improvement and/or construction of municipal infrastructure.
“I think there should be a separation,” he said, adding that having council members continually recuse themselves because of conflicts of interest “hurts the legislative process.”
He then implied that Nicholls and City Administrator Greg Wilkinson talked about the contract. Wilkinson strongly denied the allegation, noting that he wasn’t part of the bid request nor the evaluation of the submitted bids.
“I had no conversation with the mayor on this contract. I didn’t know who the bidders were. I didn’t know who would be evaluating the contract,” Wilkinson said.
“On this contract and on any of these contracts there is total separation,” he added. “We do not talk about these contracts, and up until the bid award I did not know who bid on his contract.”
Wilkinson noted that the council should be diverse, representing different segments of the population, including business people. Wilkinson pointed out that if the city adopted Wright’s perspective, it would also disqualify Councilman Jacob Miller, who works for DPE Construction.
The city administrator also noted that there could be potential for conflicts in every industry, but members of the council still need to make a living.
“Salaries for council or mayor don’t pay enough to put food on the table,” Wilkinson said.
In addition, he pointed out that staff had not
recommended that the contract go solely to Core Engineering. It was awarded to the following 10 firms: Arcadis U.S. of Phoenix; Ayres Associates of Tempe; Carollo Engineers of Phoenix; Core Engineering Group of Yuma; Dahl, Robins & Associates of Yuma; James Davey and Associates of Yuma; Kimley-Horn of Phoenix; Nicklaus Engineering of Yuma; Sunrise Engineering of Mesa; and Y.S. Mantri and Associates of Tempe.
The contract has an option to renew for four additional one-year periods, one period at a time, depending on the appropriation of funds and satisfactory performance, a staff report noted.
The city has been using open-ended consultant contracts for various types of engineering services on a delivery order basis since 1995. According to the staff report, these on-call contracts are used to obtain study and design services, bid assistance, construction inspection and administration and post-construction documentation and analysis, land survey, and other related professional services as necessary by the city
for CIP and other miscellaneous projects required by individual city departments.
The report explained that the city used a Request for Qualifications process to obtain Statements of Qualification from qualified engineering firms, as regulated by the Arizona Board of Technical Registration Code and Rules.
The city received SOQs from 25 firms. The evaluation committee, comprised of city staff, reviewed and rated the proposals received, based on the scoring matrix provided to each firm within the RFQ.
“The firms listed above consist of the ten highestranked firms as determined by the evaluation committee scoring. Based on the CIP potential workload projected within the next five years, staff recommends to award to the top 10 firms as those firms listed provided all the disciplines required,” the staff report read.
Each project will be authorized by a delivery order specifying the scope of services required, the maximum time allowed for the services and the fee. Although the amounts will vary, the maximum value of each contract cannot exceed $500,000 for a 12-month period.