Board to take second look at disputed highway contract

BOISE – The fate of a disputed contract to manage Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s $1.2 billion highway-construction program is on the line at Wednesday’s Idaho Transportation Department Board meeting.

Parsons Brinckerhoff, which lost the $5 million annual contract, has filed a 4th District Court lawsuit against Idaho over an Oct. 27 board vote that gave the contract to Washington Group International, a Boise company, and Denver-based CH2M Hill.

The suit alleges political favoritism.

Federal Highway Administration officials also have asked the state to reconsider – on concern that the Washington Group consortium won based on its ties to the state, not the merits of its proposal.

A tape recording of the October meeting indicates board members chose Washington Group and CH2M Hill at least in part because they supported Kempthorne’s “Connecting Idaho” project in the 2005 Legislature and because they’re local companies. The decision went against an evaluation team of transportation engineers and other state officials that had voted 9-0 to give it to New York-based Parsons Brinckerhoff and its partner, HDR Engineering of Omaha, Neb.

The board’s options Wednesday include sticking to its original vote, reversing its decision or even redoing the bidding process, officials said. The panel could also split the contract between the companies, although that wasn’t part of the original proposal and could require complicated negotiations.

“I’m interested in compromise, but I don’t know what that might be,” Clinton Topham, Parsons Brinckerhoff’s Salt Lake City-based district manager, told the Associated Press.

Kempthorne’s highway-building plan, the state’s largest ever, calls for selling bonds to raise cash to pay for projects including a new thoroughfare north of Emmett through Idaho’s remote Indian Valley and U.S. Highway 95 safety improvements. The debt would be repaid with future highway money from the federal government.