Hi Chad,
All contractor bids were above the Engineer’s Estimate, and very close to each other. I’ve typically seen the contractors have to justify bid items that cause their estimates to exceed 10% of the Engineer’s Estimate, but that is with a solid estimate. However, this is not the case. I don’t believe we should negotiate the estimate when difference is due to an error in the Engineer’s Estimate.
Regards,
Jennifer Cline, P.E.
City of Molalla
Public Works Director
O: 503.759.0218
F: 503.829.3676
"From: Chad Jacobs [mailto:Chad@gov-law.com]
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2014 11:23 AM
To: 'Dan Huff'
Cc: 'Jennifer Cline'; 'Heather Penni'; David Doughman
Subject: RE: Project Bidding - Engineers Estimate
Hi,
We do not believe that the City is required to re-bid the project. We would note, however, that we don’t think you can rely upon the mistaken estimate as grounds for negotiating with the Responsible Bidder submitting the lowest, Responsive Bid, under 137-049-0430 (Negotiation When Bids Exceed Cost Estimate). You may be able to do so if all of the bids are above the revised estimate as well, but we should discuss this further if that is something you want to do. Assuming you don’t want to negotiate, we don’t see any reason why you can’t award the contract to the lowest responsible bidder without re-bidding the project. Let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
Best,
Chad
Chad A. Jacobs
Beery Elsner & Hammond, LLP
1750 SW Harbor Way, Suite 380
Portland, OR 97201
t (503) 226 7191 | f (503) 226 2348
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From: Dan Huff [mailto:dhuff@cityofmolalla.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 11:44 AM
To: Chad Jacobs
Cc: 'Jennifer Cline'; 'Heather Penni'
Subject: Project Bidding - Engineers Estimate
Chad – I have a procedural question:
We put a public bid project out for advertisement and our contract engineer put the engineers estimate on the Plan holders list. I don’t believe in advertising the estimate to bidders but that is another story. We opened bids yesterday here in Molalla and then today we received an e-mail from our engineer that he made a mistake on the engineer’s estimate. He advertised the estimate at $550,000 when the estimate should have been $670,000. We received similar low bids close to the real estimate ($670,000) and the bidders all produced bids that reflected quantities and line items in the actual project. I think advertising the engineers estimate defeats the purpose of sealed bids in the first place but we did advertise an incorrect estimate.
Do we need to re-bid the project?
Dan Huff
City Manager
City of Molalla, Oregon
(503) 829-6855
"_______________________________________________________________________________
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