Bid process for board questioned

To the editor:
This letter is in regard to the front page article printed on Friday, Sept. 21 in The Commercial Review titled, “Sewer project targets another CSO.”
As I read through the article, it said the apparent low bidder had left out three or four essential documents that were to be submitted with the bid, so the board rejected the bid and awarded the job to the next-highest bidder, which had bid $18,226.49 more than the lowest bid.
I thought, wow, they must have been really important papers to pay $18,000 more for the same job. As a taxpayer I decided to investigate this a little more, so I called the company that submitted the lowest bid. A representative from the company informed me the missing documents were a Form 96, a non-collusion affidavit, and a copy of a company financial statement.
Not knowing what a Form 96 was and not exactly sure about the non-collusion affidavit either, I asked them to explain the purpose of these documents. The Form 96 is simply a document that lists the jobs and dollar amounts of the jobs the company is currently doing. The non-collusion affidavit states the company did not conspire to price-fix a bid.
As I see, none of these documents are relevant to the actual bid.
I asked the representative if anyone from the city had made contact with them to obtain those documents, but the representative said no one had done so.
This was a bid by invitation, and not publicly published, therefore the formalities of paperwork are at the board of works’ discretion, and if required before entering into a contract, the necessary documents could have been obtained within five minutes with a phone call.
As was stated in The Commercial Review, the board of works had the right to reject the bid due to missing papers, which means it had the right to table the bid, make a call and obtain the paperwork. Instead of doing this, the board took it upon itself to pay an extra $18,000 of tax dollars (utility funds) to accept the next bid.
Well taxpayers, this is your dollars hard at work. It’s said that our hard-earned money means so little to our elected officials. Something needs to change that our board of works cannot make a call to obtain papers irrelevant to the bid; it just automatically spends $18,000 more. If that money was coming from the pockets of the board members, I bet  they would have made a free call. Another $18,000 may not be much money in our city’s operating cost, but it is money that could be used for things like sidewalk replacement, street and alley repairs.
Evidently the City of Portland does not need any of these repairs.
Gary Butcher, Terry and Joan Conger, Clayton Hummel, Jason Davidson, Guy Tressler, Jeff Dunning, Fred Lingo and Wayne Stoltz
(Editor’s note: The funds that paid for this project are from the city’s water and sewer utility funds. The use of those funds is limited to improvements for those utilities).[[In-content Ad]]