RM 02-06-76 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

2. p -3 contract offers. Many contractors feel they should not have to bid on the work. They would rather be hired outright to do the job with no dollar limitation and thus enabling them to do better work. .Second, all contractors object to the massive amounts of documentation incorporated into our contracts. Because these are public funds making us responsible to many agencies and de- partments, every piece of documentation is a necessary and integral part of each contract - no matter how burdensome that contract ap- pears. Contractors also object to being told how much they have to pay their workers and reporting this payroll in the form of Weekly Wage Reports and Monthly Utilization Reports to the EEO Contract Compliance Officer, Mr. Frank Alford. Mr. Alford moni- tors each contract to insure compliance with EEO and Department of.Labor standards. These reports are mandatory. Finally and quite simply, many contractors do not have the staff to keep up with all the required documentation. In order to interest, more contractors, we assist all con- tractors in the preparation of their non - specific contract documents. Mr. Alford also assists them in completing their report forms. This is- the only manner in which we are allowed to help.a contractor overcome the "red- tape ". Unfortunately, we are not allowed to use the "open -end time and materials" contract form.with public funds. All contracts must be publicly offered for bids and awarded in a specific dollar amount. All change orders and requests for additional.funds must be approved by the Local Public Agency. It obviously makes our job much less difficult to have more contractors working in: .the project in that we are able to get the work done quicker rather than spreading it out among 8 or 9 contractors. We have made and we will continue to make sincere and intensive efforts to interest more contractors in working on these contracts. Another question raised was concerned with the quality of these con- tracts. In the past programs monitored by the Commission, you had to deal with sometimes unreliable contractors who were more interested in earning a quick dollar rather than performing well and building a good reputation. To overcome this problem, the relatively new bid /perform- ance bond requirement was incorporated into our contract conditions. The benefit of this requirement is that it "weeded out" the unreliable contractors who were financially unable to obtain bonding or submit a bond check. The only drawback was that this requirement drastically reduced the number of bidders for the rehabilitation work. An example of this can be best illustrated through the bid opening that took place on January 20, 1975 for the Southeast Project. Two weeks pre- vious to the bid opening, a question was raised concerning the bid bond requirement and the possibility of its being discriminatory. This was widely publicized by the media and the following bid opening consisted of bids submitted by 16 contractors of which only seven had submitted bid bonds or bond checks. The remaining contractors thought