Bid Rigging

I am going to rant about some pretty bad bullshit.

A good portion of last week I was working on a bid for a local small town school district. The job was to remove 4 existing roof top Air Handling Units (heat and air condition units-packaged as one unit).

Since this is a public school, the project had to be advertised and bid publicly. I spent probably 20-25 hours preparing the bid for my company, including working 6 hours on Sunday (which I really really hate doing). One of my bosses took the bid to the opening and I called him there with our final price.

He turned the bid in and the bids were opened publicly. My boss stayed for the opening. There were only two bidders. Our bid was about $36,000 less than the other bidder's. So we thought we were in good shape and would be awarded the contract. After the opening, my boss was talking to the engineer, and told him our bid was based on a Lennox brand unit for the biggest of the 4 units. There was a schedule on the project drawings which listed this unit to be from Seasons 4, another manufacturer of mostly custom Air Handling Units. However, in the Project Specifications (a big fat book full of descriptions of every product to be used in the job and how to do the work), Lennox was listed as an acceptable manufacturer. We had a price from the local rep for Seasons 4, and the price they gave me was about$19,000 more than Lennox. And in our conversations with the Lennox salesman, he informed us that he had beem in conversation with the engineer as far back as January about this project and had been approved to bid their unit for the project (the other 3 units are listed in the drawings as Lennox).

My boss told the engineer we could install the Seasons 4 unit, just around $20,000 to our bid (cost of the unit, overhead, profit, labor, etc). We would still be $16,000 cheaper than the other bidder.

But no. Since we bid with the Lennox unit, the school district decided to throw out our bid. Effectively costing the school, and all of us the taxpayers, between $16,000 and $36,000. We are pretty sure the real reason our bid was thrown out is because the Superintendent is buddies with the other bidder. They do maintenance for the school and this whole thing stinks to high hell of a rigged bid. Besides the fact our bid was thrown out, the Lennox salesman talked to the other bidder today and was told that the difference in price between his Lennox unit and the Seasons 4 unit was only $8,500. So either the other bidder lied, or the bid sent to us for the Seasons 4 was jacked up to take us out of the bidding.

So needless to say, we are pretty ticked. But the Lennox Salesman is really pissed. He did loads of front end leg work and got screwed.

If it was in my school district, I would raise hell. In this time of tight budgets, slow or no funding coming from the state, and the school district is wasting the equivalent of a teachers salary.

No wonder the state is going bankrupt.