The Pulaski County Highway Department will have to redo the bid process for this year’s Community Crossings projects. Last month, the county commissioners awarded a $1.18 million bid to Town & Country Paving for work on County Road 550 South west of State Road 39 and County Road 600 South from State Road 119 to Base Road.
But because the bids were dated 2018 rather than 2019, Highway Superintendent Terry Ruff says that process will have to be redone, in order to qualify for the INDOT grant funding. “We’ve got to rebid, advertise, the whole nine yards,” he told the county commissioners Monday. “I got a hold of each of the companies, explained it to them. We’re not trying to scalp them or anything.”
Ruff pointed out that while it doesn’t seem fair to rebid the work once the bids were publicly opened, it seems to be what INDOT wants. “Hopefully, the bids will be the same,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re going to do. But for us to get the Community Crossings grant, we’ve got to follow their guidelines, so basically, we’ve got to rebid the dang thing. If it’d been January 14, we’d have been fine, but it was December 14, I think.”
The commissioners agreed to let Ruff rebid the work. The new bids are due March 1 and will be opened by the commissioners on March 4.
This is the second year in a row that Pulaski County had to rebid its Community Crossings paving projects. The last time, it was because the county awarded a contract without going through a formal bid process.
