By Mark Waite
TONOPAH — Four more change orders for the Blagg Road sewer line repair job, adding $9,147 to the cost, will be up for approval when Nye County Commissioners meet here at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
While that project is winding down, commissioners will consider purchasing 10,000 gallons of bituminous emulsion material from Ergon Asphalt and Emulsions Inc. for $25,000, for road maintenance work on Charleston Park Avenue, Gamebird Road, Barney Street and other roads in the Pahrump area, that has been requested by Commissioner Gary Hollis.
The meeting can be viewed by video conference from the commissioner’s chambers at 2100 Walt Williams Dr. on the Calvada Eye in Pahrump. The proceedings are also viewable online at www.nyecounty.net, which has a link entitled “public meeting videos.”
Wulfenstein Construction was given the contract last April to replace the backfill in the sewer line trench. Portions of Blagg Road have opened recently after collapsing Dec. 22, 2010 following days of heavy rain.
The 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th Blagg Road change orders are under the consent agenda in which a number of items can be approved with one motion. A memo from Public Works Director Dave Fanning said these are the final change orders for the project. The original contract was $2.36 million, the cost has since risen to $3.12 million.
There are few items not on the consent agenda for the Tuesday meeting.
On the regular agenda, bids will be considered to purchase 150,000 tons of type two gravel for the Pahrump area, public works is recommending the commission accept a $562,500 bid from Wulfenstein Construction Company. Bids for cold mix are also up for approval, the recommendation is to award a $115,883 contract to Olympus and Associates.
Commissioners will consider awarding a $15,000 contract to Awesome Construction LLC to construct 4,000 feet of desert tortoise fence at the landfill, the lowest of three bidders.
Commissioners will consider releasing 85 percent of the financial security for the E Street Apartments LLC project in Amargosa Valley.
Commissioners will vote on accepting two Nevada Office of Traffic Safety grants: a $40,182 grant to help teens learn about safe driving which requires a $13,395 county match; the other a $11,000 grant to pay deputies overtime for DUI enforcement and saturation patrols that doesn’t require a local match.
A report from the Nevada Association of Counties is scheduled at 1:30 p.m.
Commissioners will be asked to support the Rural Medical Facility Investment and Improvement Act.
A representative to the Southern Nye County Conservation District will be appointed.
Charles Abbott and Associates wants to amend their contract to add a $20 per hour clerical/scanning assistant.
Patricia Oechslin has requested a wholesale liquor license at 5581 N. Highway 160. That will be up for approval by the Nye County Licensing and Liquor Board, which includes the county commissioners and the sheriff.
I am a small business and when I bid on a project, that’s my bid.
I don’t go back and ask for more please, ‘like in Oliver Twist’.
I make my bid, that’s my handshake and that’s my deal.
I stood and I did it.
Not like these construction companies that come back for more and more and more.
This has got to stop but then that’s the good old boys network in this county.
Vote Hollis out. He’s a big part of the problem.
Most of the problem with the change orders and cost overruns are caused by government, not the construction companies. I worked for an engineering company for almost 30 years. The requirements to award to low bid is the root cause of the problem. The bidders examine the bid packages (there are books that tell them how to do this). They find the problems that will allow them to reduce their bid because they can see that there will be guaranteed change orders after award. So they are rewarded for bidding less than the actual cost of the job and then using the contract to allow them to increase costs to actual costs after they win the contract.
When you submit a bid, hopefully, you know all the factors that make up that bid. With this project, there were so many unknowns as to make it a pig in a poke. The contractor and the county knew there would be many opportunities for change orders and accepted that. Unless one has x-ray vision and can see under ground, then this is a fact of life.
Thanks Carol, you just pointed a big finger at our incompetent government.
NRS 332.065 Award of contract for which bids have been advertised or requested: Lowest responsive and responsible bidder; preference given to recycled products; reawarding contract.
1. If a governing body or its authorized representative has advertised for or requested bids in letting a contract, the governing body or its authorized representative must, except as otherwise provided in subsection 2, award the contract to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder.
This has been the procedure for awarding contracts at all levels of government since WWII. Unfortunately it leads to bidders submitting bids below their expected cost in order to be the low bidder. It is unfortunate that the estimates by the government agencies are too often not accurate or are ignored when bids are evaluated and contracts are awarded leading to all too many cost overruns. The other major problem is the delays in time from award of contracts to start of work for many reasons including lack of financing being available when contract is awarded. This also guarantees cost overruns. I believe in this case the contract was awarded before all studies were complete. This is a guaranteed invitation to cost overruns.
I have seen this happen mostly in military weapons systems where the costs are enormous such as the new F-35 with stealth technology which doesn’t work in all radar systems. Big bucks for the military industrial complex.
I understand that Joni, but can you imagine what could have happened if America ran the Man on the Moon or Shuttle program that way??? And being an intergal part of some of Nasa’s programs, I was fully aware that the components that went into most of our Space Programs were done with the lowest bidder…………….and I never heard of cost over-runs and change orders like we have here in Nye County.
Maybe the county should be ever more dilgent when writing these RFQ’s. Or find someone who can.
Well I worked for a government contractor on many of these programs and I can attest that there were cost overruns much larger than anything Nye County has dealt with. They were caused by program extensions and changes in program and program requirements that were and are all too common with government work.
The lowest bidder built the Thresher – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_%28SSN-593%29
I don’t want the lowest bidder and I was in the NAVY.
The Thresher was built by the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, who built nearly every sub during WW II and many of the nukes. Also, virtually every weapons system and government project is bid and most are built by the lowest bidder. We sent men to the moon in spacecraft built by the lowest bidder, designed and built by people who used slide rules.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Naval_Shipyard