Test
To be sure that I was being fair to Comm. Valentino, I spent time yesterday with Escambia County Purchasing Chief Claudia Simmons to understand the competitive sealed bid process. Comm. Valentino has repeatedly said that those procedures were breached and that the process was flawed so I wanted to know how.
Simmons handed me the Competitive Sealed Bidding procedures (20 pages).
On the second page, Section 6 (2):
No bidder shall be permitted to correct a bid mistake after bid opening that would cause such bidder to have the low bid, except that any bidder may correct errors in extension of unit prices stated in the bids, or in multiplication, division, addition or subtraction. In such cases, UNIT PRICES BID SHALL NOT BE CHANGED. (my emphasis)
You can’t be any clearer than that. These procedures have been place since 9/19/2005. Roads, Inc. has been awarded dozens of contracts under these procedures.
Ms. Simmons told me that Roads isn’t the first vendor to make a unit price error on their bid and those vendors understood that such errors were their fault. Furthermore, Roads fully understood the bid protest procedures because they have protested other bids (for different reasons).
There was no breach – which is why local contractors were upset with Valentino’s motion to rebid the Maplewood project.
I found this all out in a 20-minute conversation with Ms. Simmons. The commissioners should have done the same. There is nothing complicated about this. Low bid wins.