Santa Paula Surprise...

I attended last night's council meeting in Santa Paula. They were going to decide whether to continue down their current path of conventional procurement(competetive bidding) for their sewer plant or to use DBO and PERC.

The estimated costs that their engineering consultants presented were about $56 million. PERC's estimated costs were $35 million(for 3 MGD). There was quite a bit of discussion and a lot of good questions and comments from the Council members and staff.

I think the most brilliant question was; what makes you think you can save that much money? (paraphrased).

(You have heard from me and others that we could be saving a lot of money. For some reason instead of enthusiastically pursuing that possibility on our behalf, the response from the City is to ignore the savings and move numbers around in our estimates. (i.e....our plant isn't $82 million, it's only $46 million but the disposal is $36 million.). Or use that "it's not apples to apples" defense.)

So, the answer is; engineering, contingencies, land, management.

Using DBO is supposed to be a fixed bid, guaranteed performance, package deal. It doesn't require contingencies, extra engineering design, program management.

They were presented with a legal opinion memo defining the requirements of Government Code 5956 procurement laws stating that you don't need daunting RFQ's. You don't need 10 pound RFP's(not 527 pages anyway).

Santa Paula voted last night to pursue the DBOF using a minimized and perhaps combined RFQ/RFP process to expedite. They fired their engineering consultants. They directed staff to manage the process rather than another engineering consultant.

Our City and members of citizens group will be meeting with PERC on the 27th.