GILROY
– It is now guaranteed that three new community parks in the
city’s northwest quadrant won’t be finished this year.
Told their bidding process may not have been fair the first time
around, City Council members on Monday rejected bids to build the
parks rather than face a contested low bid.
GILROY – It is now guaranteed that three new community parks in the city’s northwest quadrant won’t be finished this year.
Told their bidding process may not have been fair the first time around, City Council members on Monday rejected bids to build the parks rather than face a contested low bid.
The city will redo the bidding process and perhaps save a little money in the process. Officials and Council members expect Sunrise, Carriage Hills and Los Arroyos parks to be finished – with grass planted – by spring.
“The people are screaming for these parks,” said Councilman Roland Velasco, who made the motion to reject the bids, “but in the end, nobody’s going to be able to say that we lost any significant amount of time. But the Council will be able to look back and say we saved some money.”
The parks might not have been finished this year anyway if contractors couldn’t get grass seed planted by the end of October, city Parks and Facilities Development Manager Bill Headley said in response to questions from Mayor Al Pinheiro. While the city’s bid request had specifically required this to happen, Headley acknowledged that a contractor might not have been able to pull it off.
Knowing that, the Council’s vote swung 4-3 toward rejecting the bids. Pinheiro, Velasco and Council members Craig Gartman and Russ Valiquette voted yes, while Paul Correa, Bob Dillon and Charles Morales voted no.
In a discussion that followed a speech by Don Chapin, whose Salinas-area construction firm was the second-lowest bidder, acting City Attorney Andy Faber told Council members that what contractors were told about how the Council selects a low bid is inconsistent with state law.
Gilroy is a charter city, and state law once let it keep its own rules for selecting bids. That changed in 2002, Faber said, but as several Council members were disappointed to learn, the city never changed what it tells contractors.
The differences are so small that they would not have affected other bids over the past two years, Faber and City Administrator Jay Baksa insisted. They apply to cases for extremely close bids
The parks project was one of those.
Only $4,000 separated Oakland-based McGuire and Hester’s low bid of $3,646,000 – for the basic park amenities – from the next lowest, by the Don Chapin Company.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bid as close as this one was,” Baksa said.
If the city were to include several options it wants to add to the parks, such as climbing structures in the playgrounds, Chapin’s bid was actually lower than McGuire’s.
At Monday’s meeting, Chapin asked Council members to redo the bids. Faber assured the Council they were within their right to accept McGuire’s low bid on the basic park amenities only, but Chapin urged that if they do this, they not give McGuire the contract for building any of the amenities. That would be illegal, he said, and he hinted at a lawsuit.
“I’m not here to cry over spilled milk,” Chapin said. “I’m here to uphold the integrity of the bid process.”
