Hollister
– The City Council voted Monday to reject the bids for the
second phase of the Hollister Wastewater Treatment Project.
Hollister – The City Council voted Monday to reject the bids for the second phase of the Hollister Wastewater Treatment Project.
City Engineering Manager Steve Wittry said the decision will delay construction of the seasonal storage ponds, which will store treated wastewater during the rainy season, by three weeks.
During Monday’s meeting, councilmembers said they were worried about the wastewater project’s budget and timeline.
“Guess who’s going to get burnt if (the plant isn’t finished on time). Us up here,” Councilwoman Pauline Valdivia said. “If it had been done right, we wouldn’t have to go through this.”
Several misunderstandings justified rejecting the bids and readvertising the project, Wittry said. When city staffers broke down the five bids – the lowest bid was $8.7 million, and the other four ranged from $13.6 million to $14.3 million – they found substantial discrepancies.
For example, lowest bidder C. Overaa and Company estimated that sheeting and shoring would cost $50,000, while second-lowest bidder Shimmick Construction estimated the same task would cost $1.2 million, Wittry said.
“Clearly there were some misunderstandings about how the project should be constructed,” he said.
The new request for bids, which the council approved Monday, clarifies all of those issues, Wittry said, including one misunderstanding that could have a big effect on the project: The final fate of the 190,000 cubic yards of soil unearthed to make room for the storage ponds. The original bid request allowed the contractor to either sell the soil or dispose of it at the wastewater project’s sprayfields. The request didn’t set a deadline for the contractor’s decision.
“They could actually tell us during the last month of construction, in November 2008, ‘Oh, we have 200,000 yards of material to go to your site,” Wittry said.
The new bid request requires the contractor to commit to a course of action by March 1, 2008, he said.
When pressed by councilmembers about why the numbers were so different, Wittry said the firms didn’t want to give away too many details.
“Both (Shimmick and Overaa) were not really willing to share what they had in mind,” he said.
Despite councilmembers’ questions, they were unanimous in rejecting the bids. Councilman Doug Emerson said it makes sense to be careful.
“We’ve got a $100 million project here,” he said. “We should do it right.”
City staffers have said the three-phase wastewater project, which includes the construction of the wastewater treatment plant, the seasonal storage ponds, and sprayfields or other sites to dispose of treated wastewater, must be completed before the state lifts Hollister’s building moratorium.
The project is slated for completion by December 2008. Barring an extraordinarily rainy winter, the project should still finish on time, Wittry said.
City Manager Clint Quilter added that if weather really gets that bad, “the three weeks isn’t going to make any difference.”
