The Bloomington City Council approved a a $5.2 million contract with Rowe Construction on Monday night for the 2023 General Resurfacing Project.
The council previously approved a resolution on May 9, 2022, waiving the technical bidding requirements for this contract and authorized direct negotiations with Rowe Construction since that company had been the sole bidder on this annual contract for over 5 years.
During last night’s meeting rookie council member Grant Walsh hit the nail on the head when he asked Public Works Director Kevin Kothe if removing the city’s local preference policy would encourage more bidders and lead to lower bids. Kothe answered that he believed it would.
The local preference policy gives a discount on bid prices to local contractors. This makes it difficult for companies outside of the immediate Bloomington-Normal area but still in our region (surrounding counties) to be competitive with their bids. This is the nature of buy local policies. They support local business but they cost local residents more money.
Neither the Town of Normal nor McLean County have local preference policies. As a result H.J. Eppel out of Pontiac does a lot of work for both governments and Normal and McLean County residents save money.
There is no reason Walsh couldn’t move to make this change as soon as possible before next year’s construction season.
Councilmember Shelia Montney once again questioned Public Works department representatives about their Measures of Effectiveness (MOE’s). She questioned them about measuring lane miles of street being repaved and such as she did in May. Montney has good intentions, but her questions miss the mark.
Frankly, it doesn’t appear that Montney’s listening skills match her questioning skills. If so she would understand, having been told more than once now, that the MOE’s she is attempting to grasp for are complicated to arrive at and do not necessarily provide meaningful numbers .
After the meeting Cities 92.9 talked with City Engineer Craig Shonkwiler so we could report on the MOE’s the Public Works Department uses. Following is a transcript of portions of that interview.
Woodard:
So I know you guys put a lot of thought into your pavement rating systems when you are deciding what to do as far as overlays go so tell us a little about that.
Shonkwiler:
The city uses what is called a PASER system and that is a scale from one being not good to ten being excellent. And those ratings are done on an annual basis. And that is fed into what we call a decision optimization technological software.
And that software has some algorithms in it. It reflects traffic volume, amortization on a classification of roads and condition of the pavement through the PASER system.
And we can put in there a budget amount and we can figure out what we can pave with that budget and also set targets on what we want the system to be and then figure out what we would need to have on an annual basis to obtain certain targets. It’s a pretty advanced software.
I am looking that in the future here over the winter period after construction season is shut down to go through another analysis, we do it on an annual basis, but go through another analysis to present information to council probably early in 23 to talk about the possibilities of the funding and what it can get us and how we can look at the brick streets and what additional funding do we need for the asphalt and pavement preservation and such.
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Woodard:
And what kind of targets have you looked at or would you consider looking at?
Shonkwiler:
Well right now collectively our system says we are on the bottom end of a broad category called good. Overall though we are tracking slightly behind every year based upon current funding levels. And with the acceleration of inflation of cost we are starting to fall a little bit more behind.
But we try to set a target to sustain staying in that good range if we can, which we have been doing, believe it or not. But we are sliding backwards just with the erosion of the dollar.
Woodard:
So tell me if you can, it depends how intimately you were involved in this last year, can you tell me for example with the current streets that are in this current program, which ones are probably getting done because of PASER and which ones are being done for other reasons? Do you have familiarity?
Shonkwiler:
Yeah. I do. They are almost all rated as a three, which is on the poor side. There may be one or two that are a four which is on the bottom of the fair side. And those are in there because they are adjacent to another street. We are trying to bundle certain things together because it makes it easier for the contractor and then they give us a better price.
Woodard:
So I guess to try to get at Councilmember Montney’s questions and me trying to look at it from your perspective, what if we had a goal that said we are going to eliminate all the threes. We are going to get those done. Would that be an option you could look at where you eliminate all the threes it would cost this much?
Shonkwiler:
We could do that. Now keep in mind that the system is dynamic, meaning that it’s a point in time right? Things that are right now might be a three we can clear them all but there might be a four that’s heading to a three in a year.
Woodard:
Exactly.
Shonkwiler:
So one of the things we look at is keeping the good roads good, right? And that is where a focus on basically trying to keep the house in order before it gets down to a four so you are setting them back before it gets too expensive. As you slide down the scale of quality it gets more and more expensive.
When we get down into a two for instance we have to reconstruct. Sometimes when we get down to a three we have to reconstruct. So when we are capturing these threes for resurfacing we are just right at that cusp of capturing them. If we went through a delay for three or four more years then we would have to reconstruct.
Woodard:
And by reconstruct we mean getting down into the base and reconstructing bases and it’s a lot more expensive is that right?
Shonkwiler:
Significantly more yes.
Woodard:
And so we are kind of on the cusp is that fair?
Shonkwiler:
That’s correct.
Woodard:
We are keeping it good but we could slip into very poor and then the cost escalates because of reconstructing.
Shonkwiler:
That’s correct. And that’s why we focus in on pavement preservation too which, you know, keeps those let’s say a five, which is a fair, up to a good which is a six. So we want to keep as many miles of roads as we can at a six.
Now, you know, I get a lot of questions on, you know, looking at the network in totality keep in mind some roads, you know we drive on all the time and we see the pot holes and things like that. Other roads, we’ve got into neighborhoods and we are fixing those but not a lot of people are driving on that particular road, so it’s a balancing act right?
I think in the future here there will be a little more focus on our major roads. That’s where our greatest volume is. And we are going to look at that with the software matrix. You know and then also then again, more focus on pavement preservation keeping the good roads good and not letting them slip down.
Note: This story has been edited for accuracy. Comments regarding Montney not meeting with the Public Works Department have been deleted. Montney has met with the Public Works Department regarding this subject.
