Vendor blunder embarrassing

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Vendor blunder embarrassing

Opinions

Thursday, 11 March 2010 01:27

What a mess over at the Osceola County School Board and School District relating to the $14.5 million contract to replace Highlands Elementary School. With the amount of time the district spent hashing out the local vendor preferences last year, one would think all the kinks would have been worked out. But that is not the case.
Confusion over the method of awarding points to contractors – and an official protest from a firm that was ranked first initially and then third when a selection committee reconvened – prompted staff and the superintendent last week to recommend to the School Board that new proposals for the project be solicited. In a 3-2 vote, the board decided to do just that.
Officials from the top-ranked firm, Turner Construction Company, a national firm with a division based out of Orlando, weren’t happy with the decision, and rightly so. The company’s creative ideas that pushed it to the top of the ranking – even without a local preference – are now public information and can be used by any other company intending to submit a proposal to build the school.
The School Board at its March 16 meeting will clarify the method of calculating local vendor points and whether the system should even apply to construction management firms such as Turner Construction, which then hire subcontractors — hopefully local ones – to perform the work.
We hope that the School Board and district staff by the Tuesday meeting will come to agreement on how to award points and what the criteria is for being local, including what business licenses are need. Why the confusion didn’t surface earlier is anyone’s guess, since the Highlands school project would have been the second to have been awarded under the new local vendor preference system. The first was a project at Gateway High School.
While we see the point raised by Turner Construction, W.G. Mills officials, who protested, have valid concerns as well. They say no one had a problem with its qualifications on the Gateway project. The company claims there was a “new interpretation” of the local preference policy used at the reconvened selection committee meeting.
School Board Member Jay Wheeler said he was “embarrassed’ over the need to resolicit such a large contract and we, like him, hope this doesn’t happen again.