At the pre-bid meeting for UC2B's three construction projects, there weren’t enough chairs for all the contractors in attendance.  But when the bids came in, only three bidders submitted bids.  Two of those contractors, Western Utility and John Burns Construction, bid on all three portions.  Western Utility was the lowest bidder on the U of I’s and the City of Champaign’s portion, and John Burns Construction was the lowest bidder for the City of Urbana’s portion.

The only local bidder, Champaign Asphalt, only bid on the Urbana section, and came in substantially higher than the other two bidders.  John Burns Construction is working with local subcontractors to complete some components of the project; we do not know of any such efforts by Western Utility.

Everyone involved appears to be surprised there were so few bidders in the end.  Staff in Facilities and Services at the University of Illinois indicated that the number of people at the pre-bid meeting was substantially higher than for most of their contracts of similar size.  But there are reasons many contractors decided not to bid, including the size of the projects, the short time frame for completion, the small amount of time allowed to respond to bids, and some of the complexities and uncertainties in the construction requirements.

In addition to being few, the prices bid for construction were 15% higher than expected; more so in Champaign than in Urbana or the University sections.  In total, UC2B needs to find a way to save $2.67M of the $17.9M bid total, which they will try to do through design and requirements changes.  Negotiating these changes, or rebidding the project if those negotiations fail, will further delay the project which was originally scheduled to break ground in spring of 2011.