Pottawatomie County Commissioners on Monday approved the 2023 asphalt bid from Shilling Construction, who last week submitted a lone bid of over $1.9 million.
As routine as that process was, the chip seal bid process was anything but routine. After two bids were publicly opened at last week’s meeting, Public Works officials became aware of a third bid submitted prior to the deadline that went unrecognized, according to County Counselor John Watt.
Watt advised commissioners that they could simply ignore the bid that went to the spam email, based upon language spelled out in the county’s bid process. The other option would have been to refuse all three bids and rebid the project. Commissioners felt that would unnecessarily penalize the other two bidding contractors, whose bids were already made public at the March 13 meeting.
Commissioner Greg Riat stated he would have preferred a process that allowed the county to consider the unopened third bid.
Ultimately commissioners decided to go the route of only considering the original two bids, so as to not delay the process any further.
The two bids under consideration for chip seal are from Circle C Paving, totaling nearly $606,000, and from Vance Brothers Inc., totaling over $583,000.
