Mayor balks at road deals

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough mayor and assembly are at odds over how much it costs to plow and maintain roads.

“There is no justification for the per-mile cost for this (road service area) being so different from all the rest of the Borough RSA services,” borough mayor Larry DeVilbiss says in a memo explaining why he vetoed an assembly decision to award a contract to maintain roads in the Lazy Mountain area.

He actually vetoed two contracts. The other was to plow roads in the Alpine Road Service Area covering Sutton and surrounding areas. He noted that in both cases, the cost to maintain the roads had exceeded $7,000 per mile of road maintained. The winning bidder on both contracts was J.A. Spain and Sons.

But the assembly disagrees that there was no good reason for that cost.

“We added performance-based contracting, performance bonds, that’s in this contract, that’s why they are more expensive,” assemblyman Ron Arvin said.

He said the performance bonds — essentially insurance against the contractor not providing the required services — were a requirement the assembly added after an outcry from the contractor community about how contracts were awarded.

He described it as a way to let the free market determine which contractors were qualified and which were not since, essentially, the bond-holder would have to evaluate the contractor and decide on a rate to charge. He described the company providing those performance bonds as “somebody that has that as their core business and it’s their money if there’s non-performance.”

DeVilbiss was aware of the bond requirement.

“If the driving force for these contracts going over $7,000 a mile was the newly required performance bond, then we need to re-evaluate the need for that bond,” he says in his veto memo.

Assemblyman Warren Keogh, whose district includes both of those RSAs, said that he talked to community council and road service area board members and didn’t get clear guidance one way or the other on what to do about DeVilbiss’ veto.

“This has been a longstanding and very contentious issue, and I’ve given it an extraordinary amount of time,” he said before declaring that he’d decided to vote to override DeVilbiss.

Assemblyman Jim Colver also supported overriding DeVilbiss’ vetoes.

“Winter is approaching, rain could turn to snow any day,” Colver said.

He said the time to discuss the bond requirements wasn’t after the assembly had already decided to award the contract to a contractor who had followed the rules and the process.

“If we want to have a conversation about qualifications, bid procedure, bonding, that’s another conversation,” he said.

Asked by DeVilbiss what would happen if the veto stood, assistant borough manager George Hays said the contract would remain in place under the company that currently holds it.

“That contractor probably would, and rightfully so, ask for more funds than what the contract currently calls for,” Hays said.

In the end, the assembly sided with Keogh and voted to slap down DeVilbiss’ veto.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.