"Because the bid came in so much over the engineering estimate and we only had one bidder, we would like the reject that bid," Director of Public Works Michael Thane said at the meeting.
Some context
Round Rock owns and operates a surface water treatment plant with the capacity to treat about 52 million gallons of water per day through three phases. The three phases were built from 1996 to 2003 and require regular maintenance and replacement.
"That's 20 years ago—there's a lot of miscellaneous parts that we need to upgrade and replace," Thane said.
Diving deeper
The city advertised the project in October and set bids for that December. Without receiving any bids, the city extended the deadline to January, when Prota submitted a proposal for $3.2 million.
The city didn't receive many bids because of the scale of the project, Thane said. With estimations putting the treatment plant improvements at about $2.3 million, Thane said contractors may be pursuing larger projects.
"There's so many big projects going on related to water [and] wastewater plants, and a lot of those contractors are working on those big projects now," Thane said.
What's next
This formal rejection of the bid allows the city to move forward with repackaging the project and conducting another competitive sealed proposal. Because some of the improvements are of higher priority than others, the city will also prioritize the more immediate upgrades. Thane said city staff will package the smaller improvements together.
"We need to really look at getting the word out and see if we can get some more contractors' interest," Thane said. "We want that competition."
