Dissapointing Day

I had mentioned in a previous post that I am responsible for attending pre-submittal meetings and communicating with bidders on their submittal requirements to the Equal Opportunity Department. This step in the process of awarding a contract to a potential contractor is vital to ensuring SBE/DBE subcontractor participation on the project. This is especially true on federally-funded (FHWA = Federal Highway Administration) projects that have strict mandates for utilizing DBE-certified firms. If these rules are not followed precisely, future funding could be heavily impacted, leaving much needed infrastructure projects in a stale-mate.

On Monday I received a request for Bid Verification document review, for the EOD required documents portion of the bid submittal. This means that I have three days to respond to the customer department (in this case, Street Transportation) on the "responsiveness" of those bidders who have submitted the EOD documentation with their qualifications packet to Streets. It doesn't always take the full three days, but in this case I had about 50 pages of documents to review and I took my time to make sure it was done right.

Out of the six bidders, NOT ONE was deemed "responsive". Every single submittal was missing some required criteria. I was sweating. The reason is - I've never had this happen. When every bidder is deemed non-responsive, the customer department is required to START ALL OVER in the selection process. I have no idea how much time, resources and MONEY this is going to cost, but I would imagine A LOT.

I look over the documents again and again and AGAIN and even called the contract specialist working on the contract to see if maybe, by some miracle of God, there would be some piece of information she left out (there wasn't). I went to my Deputy Director and we went over the DBE Clause together, to see if maybe some instruction may have been to vague. Nope. Crystal clear. Black and white. There was no disputing what EOD required and what the bidder was required to submit.

At the end of the day, I had to send the memo to Streets with the bad news. I felt responsible somehow. So, I looked to see who attended the Pre-Submittal meeting. Only TWO of the SIX bidders attended the meeting where I practically draw a picture and spell out word-for-word what they need to submit to EOD.

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is why it is so important for these potential contractors to attend my meetings! Sheesh...