During its Sept. 19 meeting, Missouri City City Council denied a bid for the first phase of the project, worth $4.85 million. City officials had estimated the bid would come in close to $2.5 million, said Shashi Kumar, director of public works and city engineer.
“When we bid the first phase of the project, the engineer’s estimate was a little over $2.5 million, and the bids came in at $4.8 million, well above the engineer’s estimate,” Kumar said during the meeting.
Funded through a partnership between Fort Bend County and the Sienna Management District, which manages 345 acres within Missouri City’s city limits, the project aims to increase capacity at intersections along Sienna Parkway between the limits of Hwy. 6 to the north and McKeever Road to the south.
The project was slated to start this summer but was delayed when the city received no bids in April when the bidding process originally started, Kumar said in an email to Community Impact Newspaper.
In addition, the price of the low bid coming in above expectations can be attributed to “uncertainty when the project was bid from rising fuel prices and supply chain issues,” city staff wrote in the agenda report.
Missouri City will now go back and evaluate value engineering options to reduce the cost of the project before going back out to bid once more, Kumar said.
Though no exact date is known, Kumar said he expects the start of construction to be in January 2023. Once complete, the project will add a series of turn lanes and median enhancements. It will also widen shoulders at the intersections of Hwy. 6, Trammel Fresno Road, Sienna Springs Boulevard, Watts Plantation Road, Sienna Ranch Road and McKeever Road.
