Colleyville City Council rejects construction bid for gateways project

Colleyville City Council rejected the sole pitch received for the Colleyville Gateways Project at its April 6 council meeting.

“It’s unacceptable, period,” Mayor Richard Newton said. “We’ll have to go from here. We’ll back up, make any adjustments we need to make.”

City Council approved a budget of roughly $6.5 million in September 2020 for the project. The bid submitted by The Fain Group came in at over $11 million.

Aaron Duncan of Mesa Design Group, the company working with Colleyville on the project, said that more than 50% of the individual items within the bid for the project fell in line with the city’s estimate. A few others, such as stone veneer materials, light fixtures and turf and mulch, collectively made up the multimillion-dollar discrepancy, he said.

The gateways will be the third phase of beautification for Colleyville Boulevard. During the first phase, light poles were installed along the street, and the second phase, building up the medians, is currently underway.

The city and design group will do further assessment of the project to determine how to move forward.

“There’s a couple of these outliers that we wanted to dive into the details [of], do some channel chats with suppliers and so forth,” Duncan said. “With one bid, we can only do so much.”