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County approves Belleair sewer pipeline contract
By LESTER R. DAILEY
Article published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 |
BELLEAIR – The County Commission at its April 18 meeting awarded a $13.5 million noncompetitive contract to Mole Head Construction and Boring Inc. of Palm Coast for the construction of a 7-mile-long sewage main along the Fred E. Marquis Pinellas Trail from Belleair to the county’s South Cross Bayou Water Reclamation Facility, and a parallel pipeline that will return reclaimed water to Belleair.
“This project is to take the Belleair water treatment plant off-line,” Pick Talley, the county’s utilities director, explained. “We bought the Belleair wastewater treatment system two years ago.”
When the commissioners asked why the contract hadn’t been awarded by competitive bidding, Talley and purchasing director Joe Lauro explained that the county had put the project out for bids last year, but no qualified bidders responded. A second attempt brought in only one responsive bid, from Mears/HDD, which was about $5 million above what the county was prepared to spend.
County staffers later learned that Mole Head was doing a job for Clay County that was similar to the Belleair project, and negotiated with the company. They couldn’t do a straight “piggyback” arrangement, where counties pool similar jobs in hopes of getting a better price from the contractor, because 40 percent of the job specifications were different.
The Belleair project will be by far the biggest job Mole Head has ever undertaken, a full $8 million larger than its second largest project. The company couldn’t get bonding for a job of this size, so the county had to get a letter of credit to protect itself. Some commissioners worried that Mole Head might be in over its head, but Talley wasn’t worried.
“We feel comfortable (with Mole Head) even though they haven’t done a job this large,” Talley said. “They’re only laying pipes; they’re not building a building … The size of the job is the same as a lot of little jobs.”
Lauro said that he had extensively checked Mole Head’s references and previous jobs and was comfortable with them. Talley added that, if the county doesn’t hire Mole Head, it might have trouble finding another contractor capable of doing directional drilling, because most of them are booked up months or years in advance.
“Directional drilling is relatively new in the utilities field – by relatively new I mean the last 10 or 15 years – and it has mushroomed,” Talley explained.
That was good enough for Commissioner Calvin Harris.
“The company has done good work and I don’t think the scope of the job will make or break them,” Harris agreed. “If you can lay pipe, you can lay pipe.”
The contract calls for the sewage main to be made up of 18- and 20-inch pipe and for the reclaimed water line to be 16 inches in diameter. The county bought the pipe for $4.3 million last October to avoid an imminent price increase.
Construction is scheduled to take 360 days.
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Article published on Thursday, April 20, 2006
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