You might recall an earlier article There They Go Again where I wrote about the city spending 543 thousand dollars just last year for a foam roof for city hall.
The article pointed out that the project was not bid (they used a buy board), that 4 percent of the money went to the Harris County Department of Education as their cut, and that it seemed like a lot of money for that kind of roof, especially for a building that is about to be demolished.
My understanding is that the roof of city hall is about 27 thousand square feet.
Well is looks like it really was a lot of money. The November 13, 2012 city council agenda has an item requesting permission to award solicitation number 2012-271 to apply a rolled urethane coating to the municipal service center on Lafayette drive. This was evidently a real bid. You can read the details here.
The winning bidder (who is local) bid $197,888 to handle 42,700 square feet of roofing. That is $4.64 per square foot vs. $20.11 per foot for the city hall project. I don’t much about roofing. My assumption is that the city would want a better, longer lasting roof for the municipal service center since they have not announced plans to demolish the center. In fact the bid required a 15 year warranty.
Maybe a foam roof on a 10 story building that will be demolished within 2 years costs more than a rolled urethane roof with a 15 year warranty on the municipal service center. Maybe it even costs more than 4 times as much.
Wait. The company that got the no-bid city hall project also bid on this project. Their bid was 11 percent higher.
Why didn’t the winning company here get to bid on the city hall project? Maybe the city does not like the quality of their work and just had to take the low bid this time.
Wait again. The winning company’s past performance with the city (the one with the low bid) was evaluated by the city with 17.09 points (out of 20 possible) compared to the city hall company that got 16.7 points. The city likes this low bidder better than the company that did the work at city hall.
So what happened? The city evidently does know how to manage a bid.
Why was city hall such a special deal? The city had specifications written by an architectural firm. A bid should have been pretty straight forward. Instead the city awarded the business to a company without bidding and that company paid 4 percent of it’s fee to an out of town school district.
There is something rotten about this deal.
We deserve better.
elpasospeak 