Major roadways in Springfield are due for ADA-related improvements that, if approved by the Springfield City Council, will cost the city substantially more than what in-house engineers estimated.
Springfield City Council members heard the explanation for the high price tag, and expressed concern at a Sept. 5 meeting. The City Council will vote on whether or not to accept the lowest bid at $615,398 — $177,042 above estimate — Sept. 18.
Paula Brookshire, a principal engineer with the Springfield Public Works Department, attributed the high bids to inflation, the many different locations included as a part of the project and how busy construction companies are, among other factors.
Despite the steep bids, Public Works staff members recommend approval of the lowest bid from KCI Construction Company to move forward with ADA sidewalk and crosswalk improvements the city is obligated to make after repaving stretches of road around Springfield.
Details of the pricey project
If approved by the City Council, KCI Construction will be contracted to make ADA improvements, which include improvements to curb ramps and pedestrian signals, along the following corridors:
- National Avenue, from Turner Street to Cherokee Street;
- Sunshine Street, from Grant Avenue to Fremont Avenue;
- Battlefield Road, from Golden Avenue to Glenstone Avenue.
In total, improvements would be made to 19 different areas, and are composed of 21 different items.
In recent years, the City of Springfield has paid contractors to repave stretches of National, Sunshine and Battlefield. The city is now obligated to improve accessibility to the sidewalk system, according to Brookshire. The project is being paid for with 80-percent federal funds through a federal Surface Transportation Block Grant, and 20-percent local funds from Springfield's ¼-cent capital improvement sales tax.
Springfield Public Works previously budgeted $1.6 million for the project, of which approximately $400,000 has been used for the purchase of right-of-way and easements as well as some of the repaving equipment. While the city still has $1.2 million remaining in the project budget, the engineer’s estimate of the probable construction cost was only $438,354, well below the lowest bid.
In addition to the bid from KCI Construction, the city received a $779,859 bid from Ti-Zack Concrete, Inc.
“We knew that there was something that we had not expected when we opened the bids and so we dug in to try to see what the difference was,” Brookshire told council members.
Inflation, small concrete quantities blamed for high cost
Of the 21 items in the bid, two were substantially different from the city’s estimate: concrete sidewalks and concrete for the ADA ramps. Despite the difference in bids from KCI Construction and Ti-Zack Concrete, their bids on those two items were similar, according to Brookshire, suggesting the city’s estimate was off.
Brookshire first pointed to inflation as a contributor to the difference between the estimate and the bids, adding that Springfield Public Works engineers use historic bids to determine their estimates. For this project, Brookshore said she looked at bids from the last two years.
“We’re trying to come up with that and sometimes we haven’t quite figured that out,” Brookshire said.
Additionally, Brookshire said because of how busy contractors are, they can be “choosy” about the bids they make and the projects they work on, and that supply shortages can impact construction prices.
However, the scope of the project took much of the blame, from both Brookshire and included in the documentation of the council bill.
While a higher quantity of an item can often result in a lower price, that wasn’t necessarily the case for this project, because the contractor would have to work on each of the 19 areas individually — which would create the need for a low volume of concrete for each intersection, rather than the project as a whole.
“The fact that both bidders bid very similarly on [concrete], we think that’s probably appropriate for this project,” Brookshire said.
Council members suggest rebidding project
Councilmember Derek Lee was vocal about his concerns regarding the high bid of the project, saying that the estimate was “really off,” pointing to the nearly 30-percent difference.
Springfield Director of Public Works Dan Smith emphasized inflation as a major driver of the project’s price tag, adding that conditions don’t appear to be improving as it relates to construction costs.
“Looking at the pipeline of projects, looking at the dollar amounts out there, looking at the lack of contractors that are available to do the work, looking at the labor shortages, we’re in for a period of time, I’m afraid, where bids aren’t going to be as good as we would like for them to be,” Smith said.
Lee suggested the city government should have a policy that would require projects be rebid if bids come in substantially over the estimate, including this one.
“I would just respectfully say that 30-percent is not inflation,” Lee said. “There’s more of an outlier here.”
Smith said that there is no policy requiring an automatic rebid, and that the discretion of Public Works is important.
“It would have been hard to develop a policy, say, five years ago for the things that we’re seeing today,” Smith said.
Nonetheless, Lee expressed how a policy establishing a threshold to rebid projects could be beneficial for projects with even larger discrepancies between the bid amounts and estimates.
“If there was no policy at all, you could say those exact same things if it was 50 percent or 200 percent,” Lee said. “There’s got to be some number, right? Where we say, ‘Hey, we should rebid this.”
Smith said the department of public works staff wants to get the best prices possible, and if it thought a lower price was possible, the staff would seek to rebid the project. The Springfield City Council Sept. 5 meeting’s agenda packet includes language that rebidding the project may not result in any savings and would only delay construction.
Councilmember Matthew Simpson asked why the project couldn’t have been packaged into a larger project, which the city has done when faced with high or nonresponsive bids in the past. Brookshire said packaging the ADA improvements for sidewalks and crosswalks was not an option in this scenario, due to the complexities of the project and the funding sources behind it.
