WESTFIELD – In the wake of a Superior Court decision granting the city of Westfield the right to proceed with the construction of a new elementary school on Ashley Street, it now appears that the city must now put the project out to bid again.
The project’s original low bidder, Fontaine Brothers Construction of Springfield, received the contract on August 24, 2012, but City Purchaser Tammy Tefft stated that the city was informed by the office of Attorney General Martha Coakley recently that that contract is now void.
“Due to the amount of time since the contract was awarded and stopped, it’s in the best interest to rebid the project,” said Tefft this morning. “So we have to do it again.”
This is not new territory for the city and the process of putting a project out to bid hasn’t changed in two years.
“It’s the same process with state governed rules as far as bidding goes,” said Tefft. “We have to go through the pre-qualification – we’ve got to redo the design documents, since things have already been done on the site – so we have to amend the document what the project entails.”
Tefft stated that “pre-qualling” the general contractors and filed sub-bids is roughly a three to four week process.
“We then send the bid documents out for actual bidding, which is usually about a four to five week process, between filed sub-bids and general contractor bids,” she said. “We then open the filed sub-bids and a week or two later, we open general contractor bids.”
“Then, once everything is in, we go through the documents to make sure nothing is amiss and then make the award again for the construction of the school,” Tefft said.
Fontaine’s winning bid in 2012 was $25,031,000, but Tefft believes it is too soon to estimate what a low bid might look like this time around.
“It’s way too early to even tell,” she said. “We’ve got to go through the whole process of estimating it out.”
Fontaine Brothers beat out three other general contractors for the project in 2012, all of which were “within the same price” according to Tefft.
As to when the aforementioned process of putting the project out to bid will begin anew, Tefft is anticipating a start date around the end of December.
“We’re negotiating right now with the designer and the project manager, because we have to reup their contracts to back through all of this – the design, the bidding process – we have to pay for it again,” she said. “They’re submitting their proposals for the city to look at, so as soon as those are solidified, they’ll go back through the design documents, which will take about a month to go through.”
“I’m hoping to get pre-quals started around the holidays,” Tefft said.
