PORT ANGELES — Officials from Clallam County and the city of Port Angeles have rejected the bids received for general contractor services for the construction of the Joint Public Safety Facility and decided to send the project out to bid again.
During the county commissioners’ regular meeting Tuesday, county Administrator Todd Mielke explained a problem that had come up regarding the three bids received for the project.
The county received bids from H.B. Hansen Construction Inc., Neeley Construction and Interwest Construction, Mielke told commissioners.
“All three contractors relied on the same primary electrical contractor for their business, that’s a company called NuuCo and essentially NuuCo has withdrawn their bid,” Mielke said. “Instead, (NuuCo) has come back and suggested a significantly higher amount for their portion of the project, to the tune of about $750,000 in addition to what they did.”
The Joint Public Safety Facility is a project between the county and the city with a targeted cost of $22 million. The project will be a shared location for the Emergency Management division of the Sheriff’s Office and Pencom, the city’s regional 9-1-1 dispatch center. The building is planned to be a single-story structure approximately 14,250 square feet, located on Edgewood Drive across from the airport.
While reviewing this change in the bids, Mielke and Port Angeles Director of Public Works and Utilities Scott Curtin saw that, although prices for the bids were guaranteed for 60 days, NuuCo was wishing to renegotiate its terms just 30 days after the bid.
“So it did not appear that they were going to honor their price,” Mielke said. “In addition to that, the correspondence reflected that there didn’t seem to be a clear understanding of the scope of the project as they said, ‘Hey, we need to submit additional scope of work that wasn’t included in our original bid.’”
Even with the inflated price and expanded scope, the company was still not covering all essential parts of the project in its bid, he said.
“Because the same electrical contractor, and again this is a significant part of the bid, is present in all three bids that we received by eliminating one contractor, we can’t just go to the second one because we have the same problem with all three,” Mielke said.
After discussions with legal counsel, he said the best path forward would be to put the project back out for bid. The bid packet is ready to go and the county will just need to line up the advertising of the post for the project to send it back out to bid, he said.
“Todd and I did not come to this decision lightly,” Curtin said. “In fact, I think we were trying to find every other way to not go to the solution and we spoke with both legal counsel, as he said, and they were both in full agreement that just the cleanest, most appropriate step for us to take, given the situation, is to just simply re-bid the project.”
Curtin told commissioners he expected he and Mielke would be back in six to eight weeks with an update.
Despite this setback with the general contractor bid, Mielke had some good news.
“On a more positive note, I would say that the other contract that’s related to this project is for project management, and we’ve been in negotiations with the bidder on that one,” he said. “I would say that we’re probably 98 percent completed in our contract negotiations. We just hit the pause button while we took a look at this issue and stuff, but I would say that that one is basically ready to go.”
With that in mind, the commissioners voted to approve sending the project back out to bid.
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Reporter Emily Hanson can be reached by email at emily.hanson@peninsuladailynews.com.
