Second bid offering to move portables

PALMER — In light of protests from bidders who didn’t get the contract, the Mat-Su Borough School District plans to go out for bid a second time on a project to move portable classrooms used by Su Valley Jr./Sr. High School.

The job would have cost the district roughly $100,000 and move 18 portable classrooms off of the Su Valley Senior Center’s property near the high school. The portables were used as temporary schoolrooms after the permanent one burned down. The school has since been rebuilt and the portables are no longer needed.

The winning bidder the first go-round was Greenstreet Construction. But when the other bidders found out that Greenstreet was actually the highest bidder they cried foul, saying the process to select Greenstreet was unfair.

Patricia Sikes with John’s General Contracting Inc. was one of those who protested the bid. She said previously that the district’s process involved a points system, which gave preference to bidders who had done work for the district previously. She said her company was certainly qualified to do the job, having moved things much larger than portable classrooms in the past.

District officials have said the buildings needed to be moved quickly and therefore choosing a company known to be reliable was important.

But Sikes said bidders weren’t told of the points system before they submitted bids. They had no way of knowing the district had a preference for known contractors.

And the bid opening process was also flawed. Sikes said usually bid solicitors will open all the bids and put all the numbers on the table, to make sure everyone knows the process was fair. Not so at the school district. The bid opening, she said, was a secretive affair, in which officials only checked to make sure the paperwork was in order.

At last week’s meeting, the Mat-Su Borough School Board decided to reject the winning bidder, put the job back out to bid, and modify the process.

“We are going to rewrite the procedures and get them out to the bidders ahead of time,” said board member Myrl Thompson.

Board member Sarah Welton added, “the opening will be an actual opening and an announcement of the bidding.”

Asked Wednesday if it appeared to her that the district was trying to do the right thing with the bidding process, Sikes was optimistic.

“It does. And gosh I sure hope they do,” she said.

But she leavened that optimism with a healthy serving of wariness. She said she wasn’t completely satisfied. The point system, she said, graded her company on things like “integrity” and “character.” That her rating in those categories was lower than her competitors, she said, reflects negatively on her company. Really, though, that rating just reflected a lack of knowledge from the school district — John’s General Contracting hadn’t ever worked for the district before and so the district didn’t really know much about the company.

“I want them to do a retraction or something,” she said.

Another thing Sikes was pleased with, from what she can discern, the new bid will actually be two bids; one for the 18 portables and another for one year’s worth of work moving school buildings. The previous bid, she said, gave the district the option of renewing the successful bidder’s contract for three years’ worth of work.

But is Sikes hopeful she’ll get the contract?

“I just want it legal. A public bid process,” she said. “We bid what we bid. If we can make money on it that’s why we’re in business.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.