gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM – Plans for a bridge to carry the American Tobacco Trail over Interstate 40 near the Streets at Southpoint have encountered another roadblock, one that will delay the award of a construction contract for at least a few more weeks.
City officials decided to conduct a new round of bidding – their third – after just two contractors expressed willingness Wednesday to take on the project.
State law requires officials to field and consider at least three bids, so Wednesday’s submissions from D.H. Griffin Infrastructure and Blythe Construction left Durham’s Public Works Department staff one short of the number they needed.
Public Works staffers returned the two contractors’ submissions to them unopened and moved quickly to advertise a third round of bidding.
They hope to take new submissions Feb. 15.
State law will allow them to award a contract at that point even if they don’t receive three bids, Deputy City Manager Ted Voorhees said in an email to his boss, City Manager Tom Bonfield.
Bonfield quickly passed the news along to elected officials.
“We can’t seem to catch a break on this project,” he added.
Wednesday’s bid rejection came about four months after the N.C. Department of Transportation forced the city to turn down an initial offer from Blythe Construction that came in about 38 percent above engineers’ cost estimates.
Durham officials responded by increased the project budget, pegging it at $9.6 million.
But as they were preparing in December to conduct a second round of bidding, DOT again intervened, telling them to hold off while it tried to resolve a minimum wage dispute it was having with the U.S. Department of Labor.
That caused another month’s delay, pushing the planned bid opening from Dec. 15 to Wednesday.
But DOT wasn’t the source of the latest postponement.
In fact, a DOT project manager, Michael Kneiss, last Friday told Public Works officials they might have grounds to argue they’d already met the relevant statute’s “second advertisement” demand.
That drew a skeptical response via email from Byron Brady, a Public Works contract management supervisor.
Brady’s boss, Public Works Director Marvin Williams, couldn’t be reached for comment on why his staff opted for the more conservative route of conducting a third round of bidding.
City officials have acknowledged that the crossing’s design accounts for some of the problems they’ve run into when it comes to finding contractors.
There are few domestic sources for the steel components that will go into the crossing. Potential builders are also known to be wary of the DOT-dictated construction timetable, particularly its demand that the bridge be lifted into place during a single night’s closing of the interstate.
