Three of the 13 trade bids received May 21 for the new elementary school project were rejected last week, adding about $322,000 to the amount by which the trade bids exceed the estimates.
NV5, the project manager, rejected the bids because two were missing documentation and one was ambiguous. Massachusetts General Law requires that the next lowest bid be accepted in these circumstances.
This raises the amount by which the trade bids surpass estimates to $900,000 or about 6%. Bids for the non-trades, which represent about $10 million of the project’s construction costs, remain under negotiation but should be decided in the next few weeks.
The rejection of the lowest masonry bid caused about $258,000 of the new overage.
According to Tom Murphy of NV5, the lowest masonry bidder submitted a bid with two different amounts on two separate first pages of the bid form bound into a single bid document. The amounts differed by about $60,000. No other information in the bid clarified the amounts, so the bid had to be rejected as ambiguous.
The lowest painting bid was rejected because of a missing Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) certificate of eligibility. DCAMM certification is required to bid on public construction projects with an estimated cost of at least $150,000. To achieve certification, contractors must have been in business for at least one year, have completed at least $20,000 of work on three separate projects within the past three years, and have received a score of at least 80 out of 100 on project evaluations.
The third rejected bid was in the acoustical tile category. The lowest bid was missing the DCAMM certificate of eligibility as well as the DCAMM update statement. The update statement provides information on any projects completed since the contractor’s application for DCAMM certification.
Since the acoustical tile category now has only two bids, the lower is open to negotiation under the rules of bidding for public projects that use a construction manager at risk. There were only two bids in the porcelain or ceramic tile category, as well. School Building Committee Chair SusanMary Redinger told the Press she believes negotiations are ongoing in these two categories. If negotiations are successful, the amount of the bid overage could be lowered by as much as $170,000.
Bids also contained four “bid deduct” items that contractors bid on separately so the committee could remove them from the project if bids exceeded the budget. In the trade bids, removing those four items would save about $260,000. There is also about $600,000 in the budget for design pricing and escalation, but since the bids represent direct costs only with no markups, that amount would not cover $600,000 of bids.
The committee hopes that the non-trade bid total will come in below estimates and help cover some of the budget shortfall, although Murphy told the committee at a May 23 meeting that he was not optimistic about that. Non-trade items can also still be cut from the project, and the committee has a list of those items for consideration if need be. Information on how the non-trade bids look so far is expected to be available at the next School Building Committee meeting June 20.
