Recommendation to adopt Plans and Specifications No. R-7043 for the City of Long Beach Old Court House Abatement and Demolition; award a contract to Environmental Construction Group, Inc., of Signal Hill, CA, in an amount of $3,690,000 for abatement only, and authorize a 20 percent contingency, for a total contract amount not to exceed $4,428,000; and authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into the contract, including any necessary amendments thereto; Increase appropriations in the General Fund (GF) in the Citywide Activities Department (XC) by $1,373,000 for a transfer to the Capital Projects Fund (CP) in the Public Works Department (PW); and increase appropriations in the Capital Projects Fund (CP) in the Public Works Department (PW) by $1,373,000, for a total project cost of $4,428,000, offset by $3,055,000 in currently appropriated Fiscal Year 2016 non-recurring General Fund resources and the remainder from bond proceeds. (District 2)
A report from Economic and Property Development. Financial Management Recommendation to award a contract to Environmental Construction Group for the City of Long Beach. Old Courthouse Abatement and demolition for a total contract amount not to exceed 4.4 million District two. Thank you. There there is a motion in a second before I get there. I know staff. Do you have a short presentation? Yes, you do. Presentation by Mike Conway, our director of Economic and Property Development. Mayor Garcia, Members of the City Council. This item requests authority to enter a contract with Environmental Construction Group Inc, the perceived low bidder for environmental abatement of the old courthouse. This is a rebid of an earlier bid in October, which was rebid in a manner that allows the city to contract only for abatement rather than for abatement and demolition. This approach allows abatement to start immediately, which needs to be done in the interest of public safety. Regardless of the ultimate fate of the courthouse building. Demolition of the courthouse building will require a separate action by city council at a future date. In response to this invitation to bid, seven bids are received, ranging from 5.9 million to 8.5 million, with six of the bids within $700,000 of each other. The initial low bidder, U.S. demolition was rejected as a result of an error on their bid bond. The city has long held posture regarding the reliability of bid bonds, which require that the bond is clearly valid. On its face, U.S. demolitions bid bond referred to the prior invitation to bid, not the current one. While this may seem like a ministerial error, it does call into question the validity of the bid bond. And the city's long standing position is that this error cannot be waived. Waiving this error in this case would call into question all prior rejections based on similar criteria and may expose the city to additional protests and adverse unintended consequences. Two more protests were received which were reviewed determined to have no merit and were rejected. This is an important to understand that bids of this monetary magnitude, with pricing so closely compressed, are almost almost guaranteed to generate protests. But time is of the essence for this abatement work to begin and staff request that council approved staff's recommendation. And I'm available for your questions. Thank you. Vice Mayor Lowenthal. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to thank the staff for their diligence. I know this was a long process, so I do thank you for being careful and diligent about this. Q Councilman Richardson, so we're going to have any public comment on this item. Please come forward. If there is public comment. Okay. Go ahead. Eric, could you characterize the address? I'm suggesting this council hold this off. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't see in the files any. A report from our city auditor relative to the very issue of. This or raising or replacing the city hall or the entire concept of. What the city has been doing with in terms of planning, I think instead of hiring, instead of relying on willy nilly. You should rely on a friend. Request a report from the city auditor. So we understand fully the dynamics and whether or not this makes sense. And from the number of people I've talked to who are very familiar with city business, they say this is a catastrophe in the making period. So there can be there should be no harm in looking for and asking the city attorney's city auditor to present a report on such a seminal project. This project should last 100 years. So another six weeks or eight weeks is not going to rock the boat. Period. And this reminds me the way you approach this is there are three things that always stick in my mind where this is before many half of the council was here, where we disposed of property in a really inane way. Somebody came before the council and said, There's an orphaned piece of property nobody wants whatsoever. So they sold it for 17 to $0.19 an acre before the ink was dry. The guy made $1,000,000 on it. And it turns out that orphaned piece of property apparently had a sibling. Must have been but ugly. Because they'd only got 8 to $0.10 an acre. And of course, the one that sticks in my mind the most is when the city got rid of such a distressed property in such a distressed area as a 45/2 walk from Ocean to Broadway and gave away their Broadway hotel for $1. And I'll always remember that one because that was at the same time that the ladies of Cartagena. Holding policies. Secret Service. To their contract and tried that they were trying to get out of and so it. Your fiduciary responsibility is to request the city auditor to present a report on the feasibility of that. Absent that, it says, you know, and you're aware of there's something fishy that she does not want to. She should not get inside of. Thank you. Speaker, please. Good evening. Kevin De I'm an attorney from Alvarado Smith. I represent us demolition. Speaking on this item was interesting because the staff report was entirely lacking what we heard from the staff presentation tonight, which is what necessitated me to come down and speak to you, I think, on the dias for each of you, because the last minute nature of this, we have provided you a big protest letter with tons of law and tons of analysis of this situation. The initial comment was very interesting when it was described that the contract could be awarded to the perceived low bidder. That's because the the bitter that the city is looking to award the contract to tonight was not the actual low bidder. We heard the commentary about the rejection of a bid based upon the misidentification of a bidders bond. The bid bond that we're talking about here is a preprinted city form that was completed correctly. It included a reference to a prior project. That's true, but it was dated after the submission date for the prior project. It could only have been valid related to this project. And so included in the letter is the initial bid protest that that we present. And the timing is kind of interesting on this because the bid from us demolition was timely. It was the low bid. Six days passed and they heard nothing. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, they got a letter from the city, Tulane letter, saying your bids been deemed non-responsive and has been rejected because of the bid bond issue. That same day, U.S. demolition had a letter from their bid bond contractor. It's included in the packet to say that the surety was standing by the bid bond. That issue was off the table. It's ministerial. There is case law on this issue, county of Menifee. It's in the letter that that kind of irregularity can be waived and is waived routinely across the state. You're protecting the public fisc. You're using money from the general fund to abate hazardous materials in your courthouse. You have a responsibility to choose the lowest responsible bidder. The bid from US demolition should never have been rejected. That wasn't there. The. The problem that was created was the. Rejection of the bid came one day before a bid protest was due. So US demolition has put together a complete package. Asked for responses from the city have gotten nothing necessitated this hearing tonight. So the bid protest is twofold. It's very simple. We'd ask that you pull this from the calendar tonight. Don't vote on it. Have the city attorney have a have staff, look at it and analyze the bid protest. In light of the authority we've presented to you, our bid was responsive, shouldn't have been rejected. The second issue is that the potential awardee has material misstatements of fact in the bid on the public contract you're about to award. We presented evidence to you in the bid protest letter. So the the action item for you is either pull this or direct staff, our staff to analyze this further and take another look at us . Demolitions Bid Board. Thank you, sir. Time's up. Okay. Is there any other public comment on this item? See no other public comment on this item. There is a motion and a second on the floor. Members, please go ahead and cast your vote. Motion carries. Okay. Thank you. Item number nine.