Bidding climate on public projects seems to becoming more positive after higher costs

MASON CITY — After a few years of bids on public projects that were mostly higher than the estimated cost, the bidding climate seems to have become more positive in recent months.

Mason City’s city administrator Aaron Burnett told the City Council last week that the environment is more positive than it had been. “I don’t want to jinx it. I feel like we’ve paid our dues over the last two years with a just bruising bid environment. To answer the question, I think we are seeing those bids return to a more normal environment.”

Burnett says being conservative in estimates has also helped the city better plan to deal with the costs of a project. “When you look at estimates, estimates that have been purposely increasing those estimates to make sure that projects can actually move forward. I won’t speak for the finance director here, but it’s very difficult to move forward with a project that you’ve been planning for two years, and then you have a 20% overrun, and you have to find those funds. Sometimes you’re then triaging in the current year or the outyears to try and find the funding to move forward with the project that you went through design, and bid, and now you’re 20% over budget.”

Burnett says after experiencing the higher bids the last two years, they will continue with the mindset of being conservative with project cost estimates in the future.   “We’ve seen those estimates increase, we’ve done that in our five-year plan to make sure that we can move forward with them. By no means do I think it’s like building a bunch of fluff into estimates, but they are safe estimates. We want to make sure that we are able to move forward and hopefully we can start bringing those estimates down a little bit as we see a better bid environment.”

One example of having better bids on a project is last week’s approval by the Mason City City Council of the winning bid for the Taft Avenue Water Main Loop project that will help with the water infrastructure in the city’s industrial park. The lowest bid was just under $2 million, about $700,000 under the engineer’s opinion of probable cost.