Valley faces snags in bidding out jobs

Spokane Valley’s latest efforts to privatize as much of its business as possible have met with mixed results in recent weeks.

The city will save an estimated $50,000 by turning over weed control and landscaping along roadways and storm swales to a private company. But the low bid to repair the city’s potholes came in at almost twice what the city estimated Spokane County would charge for the work.

No one bid for a contract for city street sweeping.

“It’s just a very complex thing to bid,” said Public Works Director Neil Kersten.

There are firms in the area that own sweepers but none of them do jobs of that scale, he said.

The request for bids followed a Feb. 14 City Council motion to begin opening parts of its street maintenance contract with Spokane County to private competition. If it’s cheaper to do so, the city and the county recently agreed to a plan that could privatize up to half of the work in the contract over the next three years or move it to city departments.

The city received three bids from contractors offering to repair potholes this summer. The estimated prices ranged from $311,000 to $579,000 while the city had budgeted about $168,000 for the county to do the repairs.

Pavement contractors said the nature of the work made it difficult to set a price.

“It was tough to put the bid together,” said Lee Bernardi, the pavement division manager for Degerstrom Corp.

There’s no way to predict where or how big potholes will be before they form. The city would have paid for repairs on a per-square-yard basis, so some jobs would have been worth more than others.

“Just to move the guys and the equipment to any job is going to run somewhere around $500,” Bernardi said.

In other words, small potholes could cost a company more in incidental costs than it receives for actually repairing them.

During the summer, Spokane County employs crews dedicated only to repairing potholes, which could be why its costs came in lower than the bids, said Assistant County Engineer Bob Brueggeman. Costs tend to be higher when crews are on call.

Because the bids came in so high, Spokane Valley’s public works department likely will change the way the contract is set up and put the work out to bid again. Replacing the surface-area measurement with an hourly rate could bring down the cost of the bids, Kersten said.

The city also will reword its bid request for street sweeping and try a second time to attract companies to do the work.

Mayor Diana Wilhite said she didn’t know how the bidding would go when the contracts were opened to private competition.

“We need to see how the private competition would compare to the county, and in some cases the county is a better deal,” she said.

The push to move part of the city’s public works duties into the private sector is the latest incarnation of the council’s philosophy that private enterprise should conduct public work if it can get the job done for less.

Last summer city parks maintenance was turned over to Senske Lawn and Tree Care, which council members and others have praised for the quality of its work.

In 2004 a council proposal to hire a private company to run the Spokane Valley Library caused a public outcry that eventually led to voters annexing the facility to the Spokane County Library District.

In the street maintenance contract, Spokane County charges 24 percent above the price of the work for overhead costs – an expense that city officials said would be reduced if it set up contracts with private companies.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the City Council approved a $49,000 contract with Spokane Pro Care to handle landscaping and weed control that cost $118,000 in the county contract.

Much of the work was done by Spokane Pro Care anyway under a contract it held with Spokane County. Even after the city hires an additional person to oversee the work, the city will save money by contracting with the company directly.

“This is a great example of how we are trying to provide a higher level of service with lower cost,” Councilman Rich Munson said at the meeting. “We don’t just do this with weed control, we do it with everything we do.”