County to vote on bridge contract

The Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors is set to award the nearly $2 million Phoenix Lake Road bridge replacement project Tuesday.

Awarding the contract was postponed for a week at the behest of a local contractor, Doug Benton, owner of Tuolumne County-based Sierra Mountain Construction Inc., the second-place bidder for the project. Benton wanted time to view the bid documents of Lodi-based Ford Construction, which the county Public Works Department has recommended for the job.
 

Ford Construction submitted the lowest bid, $1.696 million, which is more than $400,000 lower than the county engineer’s estimate. Sierra Mountain Construction’s bid came to $1.849 million. In all, six companies submitted bids.

Supervisors had agreed to postpone based upon the recommendation of Public Works Director Peter Rei, who said Benton had made a request to review bid documents early last week, but did not receive all the documents he wanted prior to last Tuesday’s meeting.

Rei didn’t find postponing the long-awaited project appealing, but he said he wanted to be fair.

Benton has a history of taking a fine-toothed comb to his rivals’ bid documents, having been a central figure in the Tuolumne City Sanitary District’s legal battles after it was recently sued by a Dos Palos-based contractor.

That lawsuit centered around the district awarding a $6 million wastewater treatment plant construction project in May 2008 to Benton’s company, even though it wasn’t the lowest bidder. The rival company claimed California law requires that contracts be awarded to the lowest bidders. The company further accused the district of giving Benton the award because of his local roots.

Benton, who had arrived at the 2008 meeting where the sewer contract was awarded with a group of supporters and a lawyer, told the sanitary district’s board that the low bidder had “inconsistencies” in its paperwork, nullifying the district’s legal obligation to award the contract to the lowest bidder.

The district board unanimously gave Benton the award and eventually prevailed in court, allowing Benton to keep the job, designed, in part, to accommodate growth at Black Oak Casino.

In a brief Tuesday interview, Rei didn’t advocate on the behalf of Ford Construction, but he said all the company’s bid documents have been reviewed by Public Works staff and the County Counsel’s Office and appear to be in order.

The replacement of the Phoenix Lake Road bridge over Sullivan Creek has been in the county’s sights since at least 1995, when a resolution was passed to seek federal funding for it under the federal government’s Highway Bridge Replacement Program.

The roughly year-long project will involve not only replacing the bridge, which dates back to 1948, but also reconstruction of the bridge’s narrow roadway approaches.

The new bridge will be a “pre-cast reinforced concrete structure,” and 60 feet high and 40 feet wide, according to Public Works documents.