With construction bids coming in significantly over budget for the state’s plan to cool 1,000 public school classrooms, one state lawmaker is calling for a criminal investigation into possible collusion among contractors.
Rep. Matthew LoPresti, whose Leeward Oahu district includes many of the schools on the Department of Education’s cooling priority list, is asking the attorney general to look into the matter.
“Something isn’t adding up,” LoPresti (D, Ewa Villages-Ocean Pointe-Ewa Beach) told reporters Thursday in the state Capitol courtyard. “Other than the fact that the hot labor market can’t explain this jump; other than the fact that the equipment prices haven’t changed; and other than the fact that every person who bid for this was up to four to five times over what they said it would be — I mean, that right there raises a lot of eyebrows.”
Department of Education officials earlier this week informed the Board of Education that it was halting the awarding of bids because proposals had come in too high due to increased labor costs spurred by the state’s construction boom and a limited pool of “pre-qualified” contractors bidding on the work.
Dann Carlson, assistant superintendent for school facilities, told the board Tuesday that the DOE has outright rejected some of the bids and is working to renegotiate others under the state’s procurement laws, but anticipates rebidding most of the work in early July — likely delaying by several months a project that initially was envisioned to be completed by December.
Using early estimates from the field, Carlson said the department had been budgeting $20,000 to $40,000 per classroom for equipment and installation of air conditioners, anticipating the initial 1,000 classrooms — spread across 33 of the state’s hottest schools — could be completed for roughly $45 million, with most schools receiving solar-powered air conditioners.
The rest of the $100 million appropriated by the Legislature would be used to cover energy efficiency upgrades to reduce energy consumption at schools, as required in the funding legislation, as well as air conditioners beyond the 1,000 pledged by Gov. David Ige in his State of the State speech in January.
But proposals in the initial round of bids opened June 10 exceeded those early estimates, with one proposal coming in at $135,000 per classroom. The DOE is not disclosing the names of the companies because no bids have been awarded.
“(An) investigation would benefit the competitive bidding market, increase transparency, and allow the state, industry and the DOE to get to the truth of the matter,” LoPresti wrote in a letter dated Thursday to state Attorney General Douglas Chin. “While I personally do not know whether any civil or criminal action should result from this, it appears at face value completely unacceptable that a bid should be reassessed five-fold within one month, for a request for work addressing a dire and desperate situation that threatens the safety and welfare of students, teachers, and staff in our hottest classrooms.”
Joshua Wisch, special assistant to the attorney general, said the department received LoPresti’s request and would review it.
In the meantime, LoPresti said, he’s spoken with one of the companies that bid on the cooling work and plans to meet with more contractors to discuss the high bids. He also is in talks with the DOE, because he said he’s been told that some of the work specifications for the project are 100 pages long and potentially beyond the scope of $20,000 to $40,000 per classroom as initially estimated.
“So I’m not just laying this at the feet of the contractors and saying there is collusion. If there is, then the attorney general hopefully will look into that,” LoPresti said. “And if there’s not, then we need to find out what’s being done improperly from the state’s side, from the DOE’s side.”
The DOE acknowledged the project documents are detailed but said none of the individual air-conditioning projects have 100-page-long specifications.
“The specs are not unusual. Most of our contractors are used to such detailed documents,” Carlson said in a statement Thursday. “We have heard back from members of the industry on ways to improve the bidding process moving forward, including making the packages bigger and therefore more attractive for contractors and into a time frame outside of this month, when a high volume of other bids are due for state and county agencies.”
LoPresti also is encouraging electricians and contractors to lend their expertise to voluntarily install air conditioners in their neighborhood schools, an idea the Hawaii State Teachers Association also suggested to the BOE. “We cannot just wait for another round of bids and hope they are reasonable,” LoPresti said.
Anyone interested in donating to a school is asked to contact the school’s principal. For non-school-specific donations, contact the DOE’s Auxiliary Services Branch at 586-3452.
