Highway contractors will get not one or two but a total of four cracks at nearly $500 million worth of road construction projects beginning this week.
The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department has split Tuesday's bid-letting into a morning session and an afternoon session and has added a bid-letting to its calendar in January.
Breaking up the bid-lettings is a twofold strategy that state highway officials say they hope will result in more opportunities for contractors to get a piece of the action and, as a result, also help ensure more competitive bids for Arkansas taxpayers.
"It helps spread the work around," Danny Straessle, a department spokesman, said last week. "It should bring better prices and allow contractors" a better opportunity at getting work. "It tends to be a win-win situation."
The shift in strategy came after the department's October bid-letting resulted in agency officials rejecting bids worth $71.9 million on seven highway and bridge projects. That was out of bids on 35 projects totaling $242.5 million that were opened.
Six of the seven projects on which bids were rejected had only one bidder; the seventh had two bidders. Nine projects attracted only one bid.
The rejected bids included projects on Interstate 430 at the Interstate 30 interchange and the Cantrell Road interchange in Little Rock.
For one of the two projects on I-430, it was the second time that department officials had rejected the bids.
In June 2014, the department rejected two bids on a project for the I-430/I-30 interchange.
At that time, the project involved constructing new interchange ramps, widening the I-30 frontage road and adding a third lane on I-430 between Stagecoach Road and the interchange, all of which would accommodate growth in the area. Part of that growth is from the opening of the Bass Pro Shops store and The Outlets of Little Rock.
The two bids submitted for the project were for $43.7 million and $37.6 million. The higher bidder would have completed the project in 366 days, 51 fewer days than the lower bidder.
Tens of thousands of motorists use the interchange daily, and the burden on commuters is taken into account when reviewing bids for projects.
The Highway Department eventually split the project into two parts. The first part consisted of adding a southbound off-ramp from I-430 feeding into the I-30 frontage road. A $13.4 million contract was awarded for that project in December 2014, and the off-ramp has since opened.
Bids for the work on the second phase -- which consists of widening the frontage road and adding a westbound exit on I-30 east of the interchange and a ramp from I-30 west to I-430 north -- were among those rejected at the October letting.
Just two bids were submitted. The lower was for $21.7 million.
The department also rejected the single bid of $9.4 million for a project that would add a northbound on-ramp from Cantrell Road to I-430.
Both projects are included in Tuesday's letting, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
The October bid-letting happened after contractors had spent much of the year watching the department pull projects because of uncertainty over federal funding.
Earlier this year, Congress approved a short-term federal funding extension, which state Highway Department officials credited for reinstating the stalled projects. Twenty-six projects in the Oct. 13 letting were among 87 projects worth an estimated $411 million that the department had pulled earlier in the year.
Two projects received no bids at all.
It may have been a case of too many projects offered at once, officials said after the October letting, when contractors had only one shot at getting work.
As a result, they didn't want to bid on too many projects for fear they would have too many projects to complete in a short time frame, according to Richard Hedgecock, executive director of the Arkansas chapter of the Associated General Contractors.
"All of sudden, it could be, 'Uh-oh, I've got all three projects'" on which the contractor submitted bids, he said last week. "'How I am going to staff this? How can I complete these projects on time?'
"The issue was an embarrassment of riches with so many projects coming out at once. You have to be much more choosy in what you submit numbers on."
The ramp-up in projects also came at a time when contractors had made adjustments to their work schedules. Perhaps they scaled back and concentrated on city street and road projects, Hedgecock said.
It also comes at a time when the state has two other ongoing construction programs that are primarily state-funded and not the federally funded projects that were pulled from bid-lettings earlier this year.
The state projects include those under the $1.8 billion Connecting Arkansas Program, which is financed mainly from a temporary half-percentage-point increase in the statewide sales tax, and the $1.2 billion interstate repair program, which centers on bonds that are sold and repaid with federal money the state receives for interstate maintenance.
"Compared to other states, at least we're still putting out work," Hedgecock said.
The contractors welcome the shift in strategy, he said.
He and Straessle said if bidders do not submit a low bid in the morning session, they will be able to study the other bids, adjust their prices and submit a bid on the project in the afternoon. And if unsuccessful on Tuesday, contractors will have another opportunity in January now, they said.
"We're hoping by making these tweaks, you get more competitive prices," Hedgecock said. "It's what we want in the end, as taxpayers ourselves."
Metro on 11/30/2015