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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
STATE PERSPECTIVE BY ROY MODE
MR. MOSELEY: Next on the program is Roy Mode who is a professional engineer and is chief of the Office of Project Management and Critical Project Expediting, Division of Office Engineers, Engineer Service Center, California Department of Transportation. He manages the delivery of post-design projects through the final construction contract preparation, advertisement and bid opening.
MR. MODE: Thank you, Bob. My basic responsibility is to accelerate the delivery of projects and this is competitively bid projects through the department to get a contract out to construction. I´m also responsible for developing CALTRANS standards and plans.
Just about everything I was going to cover has already been covered, so I´m going to highlight some of the areas that haven´t been.
I´m going to give you a little brief description of the setting in CALTRANS to put what we do in perspective. I´ll cover the evolution of our contracting procedures from what I call the "stone age" when we did everything manually by pen and pencil through where we are today. I´ll talk about innovative contracting but as the previous speaker said, it´s not innovative contracting. These are contracting techniques that have been used prior to emergency situations and how we apply them to our emergency response and how we have integrated them back into our normal non-emergency work.
I´ll describe the lessons we have learned from the various emergencies we have had over the years; where we´re going from here; and how technology is going to help us to respond even better. The emphasis is on competitively bid contract, however, our initial response to emergency is by our maintenance forces. Then we go to force account or time and material contracts that are one-page contracts that can get a contractor out and working quickly. And then we move to the competitively bid contract as quickly as we can with fully engineered projects. CALTRANS normally has a large construction program. When we are in emergency situation, we do not relieve our contractors from completing their projects within the time frame of their contracts. They´re not given any break in an emergency situation. On the same note, neither is our staff. Our staff is also expected to deliver their projects on time. So we absorb emergency projects.
Jim Roberts said on the first day that we have 23,000 employees. In fact, in the emergency situations that I´m going to talk about, we did not have that many employees. At Northridge we were around 16 to 18,000 employees. That´s a lot of staff. You can do a lot of work with those employees. We do a lot of emergency projects every year. From 1996 through 1998 we had El Nino and La Nina and mostly storm damage. We do get an earthquake from time to time. I´ve lived through several of them and it´s not a fun thing.
To get into the CALTRANS contracting process evolution, I will start with the time before the Loma Prieta earthquake. I started working in my current job in 1988. I was aware of what we did in changing our process for emergency response before the Loma Prieta earthquake and, of course, I have been in the midst of the changes since then. I´ll explain what we learned from Loma Prieta and how we applied it to Northridge. We also applied some things we learned from the FHWA Special Experimental Project 14 or SEP-14.
Okay, now for the "stone age". We did everything by hand and hard copy. Our regional district offices drafted the contract plans and specifications and hard copied them up to us either by plane, car or mail. We processed the final construction contract documents by completing the plans, contract special provisions, added the legal language, went through the letting process, bid opening, and award. We did have electronic typewriters to help us but it was pretty much all a manual process.
During that time we had a statewide emergency response plan handled primarily by our maintenance people, emergency coordinators and emergency response teams in each of the districts, and a headquarters command center also run by our maintenance department. The districts had lists of contractors they could contact in emergencies. In those days, it took us two to three weeks just to prepare the final contract documents and get them published. We used those giant offset printers that used a photographic process to make print plates. On large projects, it could take up to ten days just to make the plates so we could print the plans.
We typically advertised for three weeks. We almost always request an exception to the three-week minimum advertising time from the FHWA. On some projects we do not but may use a longer advertising time. From the time we opened bids to the time we awarded a contract, it typically took us one to two weeks, sometimes a little longer, depending on any complications.
After we awarded the contract, we required a payment performance bonds from the contractor before it could be executed. They had to return the executed contract with the bond and we signed it. The contractor could then start the work one week after we approved the contract. So the emergency contract process took two and a half to three months from the time we received a draft contract until we had a contractor out in construction.
For emergencies, that was unacceptable. We needed to get our contractors out there much quicker. So there was a need to change our process.
One of the very first things we did was implement an automated computer system that was a desktop system using PCs linked to all of our district offices. We had 22 local area networks tied to a wide area network of 200 desktop PCs. We were conducting business that way in a lot of areas but not in all areas. We could at that time develop the contract specifications in the districts electronically and e-mail them to headquarters where we could finish processing them very quickly. It took us a day or less to develop final contract documents from the draft specifications provided by the district offices. We also started awarding the contract on the same day of the bid opening. Our electronic process at that time did not support the award process and it took us eight to ten hours to award a contract. And we required the low bidder, the three low bidders to stay after bid opening until we awarded the contract. We let the two next low bidders go if it looked like there were not going to be any award issues. If the apparent low bidder left, they were disqualified as being non-responsive and we went immediately to the second low bidder.
We started counting contract working days immediately after award instead of after contract approval. We did that for a fairly important reason related to the use of incentive/disincentive provisions. This was our first try at using incentives/disincentives and we learned a lot. We had set a pretty high incentive/disincentive amount on one of the contracts and because the working days didn´t actually start until after contract approval, the low bidder delayed executing the contract an extra couple of days. We were in a bind and not sure what happened and wondered if we should declare the low bidder non-responsive. He claimed he didn´t get notification of the award in a timely manner. This is why we now have a contractor´s representative present at the time of the award and why we started counting working days immediately after award to give the low bidder the incentive to sign the contract and get it back to us quickly.
We also use modified DBE requirements. We had very high DBE goals on these, on most of them, the big ones, over 30 percent. In order to award in the same day, we needed all the good faith documentation to be submitted with the bid. Our normal requirement is to have the documents in within eight working days after the bid opening. We couldn´t make it too onerous on the contractor. For evaluating his DBE good faith efforts, we required his phone list, contact list, the contractors that they contacted and whether they accepted or rejected their bids and why. It was very simple documentation.
We also established a local assistance center in the area of Loma Prieta actually in the City of Oakland to help both the DBE´s and the contractors to arrange for DBE participation. We employed pre-award qualifications step. We sent a questionnaire out with the bid proposal. The perspective bidders answered the questions and we had a meeting with them prior to the actual award of the contract. We wanted to be sure each understood the scope of work and the dangers posed to the public and that they had the experience to perform satisfactorily.
We learned we didn´t have to modify our procedures too drastically. We used our same procedures but did them much quicker. We created team specialists to deal with specific contracts and they were able to get through the process very quickly. When we first started using the incentive/disincentive provision, we weren´t getting any benefit out of them. We weren´t seeing a reduction in construction time. We met with the industry and they told us we weren´t using high enough incentives and that there wasn´t anything to offset the cost of doing anything unusual or differently. Our incentive/disincentive amounts weren´t high enough to pay for second shifts or overtime. So we started going to higher and higher incentive/disincentive amounts. They made us a little nervous and I´m sure it made the contractors a little nervous. That´s when we learned we needed to start counting contract working days rights after award.
We didn´t have good communications. One of the cellular phone companies loaned a lot of cellular phones to us. This helped immensely. We learned we needed to have a liaison person to deal with contracting issues at the districts. They helped them through the process so by the time we got their contract packages together, we knew we had exactly what we needed to finish the process. We used couriers for everything. We found them to be very effective and we continued using them on other emergency projects as well.
We still needed better communications. We needed to be able to get information out to the bidders continuously and quickly. We were doing some two and three day advertisements during the Loma Prieta on fairly simple projects but we still had to get changes out but didn´t have a quick deployment method. So we were still lacking there.
We also were doing a lot of what I call sneaker mail. Our approval process requires a lot of people to get involved. The only way we could get them involved quickly was by taking the hard copy document and running it around from place to place in other buildings or across town. This was awkward and took extra time.
In Northridge, we saw a lot of damage: bridges, roads, and a lot of local streets. We issued 110 contracts. 58 of them were the time and materials or force account type contracts. 52 of them were competitively bid. Ten of the competitively bids contracts were A plus B with large incentive/ disincentive amounts. Ten of them were by invitation only. Eight of the invitations were A plus B and two were not. The remainder were just accelerated emergency contract processes.
The Northridge earthquake occurred on January 17th. We knew we were going to be called in to respond with emergency and competitively bid contracts. Beyond that, we didn´t know what we were going to be asked to do.
On Monday, January 24, we received a visit from the Chief Engineer, the Chief Bridge Engineer, the FHWA Deputy Highway Administer, and the FHWA California Division Administrator.
They told us on that on Wednesday, January 26, we were going to receive draft plans and specs for a project to replace the Gavin Canyon Bridge. This was a $15 million project. They said that the design will be incomplete and it won´t be completed for two weeks after we award the contract. And we were going to award this contract on Saturday, January 29th, three days after we received it. So we had prepared the project for letting, get it out to the bidders, allow them some time to bid it, and then open it and award the contract Saturday, three days later. It´s going to be an A plus B contract. Well, we had done three A plus B contracts as part of SEP-14. We didn´t consider any of them a success. We used the wrong type of projects, but at least we knew what an A plus B contract was and we had some contract language for that. They also told us that the contractor is going to be expected to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We had had accelerated projects before and nothing like that but we could deal with it. They told us that there was going to be a 40 percent DBE goal on the project. And finally, it was going to be by invitation only and only three contractors were going to be invited. We argued to open it up to a few more bidders but that didn´t work. We knew we were going to get calls from every other contractor wanting to know why they weren´t allowed to bid on it. And that´s just what happened.
We got as much information about the project as we could to explain how complete the plans were and when we would have final plans completed. We still couldn´t tell what the incentive/disincentive amount would be. We knew it was going to be large but didn´t know how large.
So we called the contractors in one at a time. You can just imagine the conversations. We had to rely on two things in dealing with the contractors. First, that this was the contractor´s home as well as ours and he had a true concern and caring about getting the project underway and correcting the problem. Secondly, we had to rely on their monumental ego that they could do anything.
So we called the contractors and explained that we had this emergency project to replace the Gavin Canyon Bridge, a $15 million project. We described it to them and asked, "Are you interested in bidding on it?" We told them it´s going to be by invitation only, but we can"t tell you who the other bidders are until we have got agreement from everybody who"s going to bid on it. And it will be an A plus B contract with a very high incentive/disincentive amount. We don´t know what it is yet, but it"s going to be very high. It will be an A plus B bid and explained that. And that they weren´t going to get completed plans until ten days after the awarded the contract. And you are going to be required to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Which means you are going to be working for the first ten days, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and without completed project plans. Is that okay so far, sure no problem. And we´re going to have a 40 percent DBE goal, but the good news is that we´re going to give you two and a half days to bid on it. Are you still with us? Every one saw the challenge and agreed.
As we expected, we did get a lot of calls from the other contractors who wanted to get involved in this, so we had to take action.
We had some experience with three A plus B projects as part of this SEP-14 so we had a general idea what they were all about. We had some rough contract language we could use. What we didn´t have at that time was a very high set of incentives/disincentives. On this first project it was $150,000 a day. The previous ones we had done were like $1,200, $1,500 a day. The contractors just ignored that. I think the liquidated damages were higher than that. The $150,000 a day was based on the road user delay cost of $300,000 a day. We didn´t feel we would get any bidders if we put an incentive-disincentive of $300,000 a day. So we took the amount of road user delay and cut it in half.
We had done some incentives/disincentives as part of the Loma Prieta but not of this magnitude. We had the specs and we knew how to deal with that. We had done minimal work requiring 24 hours a day/seven days a week with no relief from weather, holidays or anything. Keep in mind that the incentive/disincentive of this magnitude is six to $8,000 an hour so there is a lot of money involved.
We received the draft plans and the specs on January 26, Wednesday morning. By six o´clock that night we had completed a final contract and had them published using our giant offset printers. We didn´t have any idea how we would ever get plans and specs out to all the subcontractors, suppliers and others who needed sets of plans during the two and a half day advertising period, so we got the contractors to agree to handle that on their own. We told them we would give them as many sets of plans and specs as they wanted and they had to distribute them. One of the contractors was at our distribution center to pick up his plans and specs. We boxed up the rest; put them in a van; and drove them out to the airport where the second bidder took his set. Now, this was the interesting part. The second bidder agreed to take the plans and specs back to Los Angeles and give them to the third bidder. Now, how many contractors out there are going to help their competitor in that way? That kind of gives you an idea of the sense of urgency by everybody. This was pretty much our operation for all of our contracts, except that we didn´t typically meet the contractor at the airport. We normally boxed them up, took them to the airport, put them on the plane, and we hauled them to Los Angeles.
When you fly on a plane, you know that the airlines will allow you three pieces of luggage. We were sending our liaison back and forth and he was allowed to bring three boxes without charge but he usually had another ten or 12 boxes. We ended up buying a lot of plane seats to get the rest of the boxes delivered. We didn´t have a contract for airfreight and we didn´t know whether the airfreight would get there when we needed them.
We didn´t always get the stuff done within the time we needed to. We knew we were going to probably miss one of the flights going down to Los Angeles. When that happened we would dispatch two of our people, one of them our toughest negotiator, out to the airport with the instruction to delay that plane, no matter what it took short of going to jail. In the meantime, we would call the airlines and the airport. We talked to anyone who could delay the plane a little bit so we could get the plans and specs out. The airlines understood our predicament and cooperated but couldn´t officially say they delayed a plane.
When the dignitaries initially came in to talk to us on Monday morning, we had till Wednesday morning to have our entire act together. We knew we couldn´t do our normal bid opening process in Sacramento when the contractors only had two and a half days to bid and they were in Los Angeles. So we moved our bid opening award and contract approval team to Los Angeles and set up shop there.
Now, we were lucky. We had a very fine communications system, a very fine automated system and we were able to go down there and set up our system. What we didn´t anticipate was a space problem at the district office. We needed a lot of space for this operation. We needed a place to conduct bid openings, rooms to conduct hearings, areas where contractors could finalize their bids, waiting areas for contract approval or execution, and areas to start organizing for the start of work the next day at 12:01 a.m. We needed our own document processing area for our staff. We were totally unprepared for that.
Fortunately, the Los Angeles district office is a very large. We were able to shift people around a little bit to make space. If you need to go mobile and take your take your process to where the damage is, you need to plan in advance how you´re going to mobilize, set up and get operating.
What we also learned is that when you´re using a very high incentive/disincentive amount, you´ve got to be very specific when a working day starts. On the first contract, we weren´t. We used what we learned from Loma Prieta and said working days would start the day after award. The hour it starts is also important when you´re talking $150,000 a day. Well, we didn´t run into that problem at the Gavin Canyon but we quickly corrected it. We started working days at 12:01 a.m. on the day following award. Now we had a specific time.
When you´re doing something unusual and all of this was to all of these contractors, you have to clarify as much as possible. We provided examples of every possible time scenario that we could think of on how these contracts would be administered. If you finished at this hour, do you get an incentive or don´t you? We went through step by step so they would have a complete understanding.
We knew only inviting three contractors to bid on the Gavin Canyon project would attract a lot of attention. So on Friday while that project was being advertised, we sent out a questionnaire and a fact sheet to the construction industry. We described what the Gavin Canyon project was about and that it was A plus B with an incentive/disincentive of $150,000 a day, 24 hours/ seven days a week contract. This gave them an idea of the type of contracts that they would be bidding on. We asked them to respond by close of business that day on whether they wanted to be on the invitation list for the other projects.
We had implemented electronic outgoing fax where several hundred people could be reached simultaneously. That was very handy in reaching 3,000 contractors that morning to give them until that afternoon to respond back to us. We got 15 to 20 who were willing to bid on these kinds of invitation only projects. Once we set that list up, it never changed: we did not add or subtract anybody from that list. But there were conditions and I´ll get into those a little later.
On only three of the ten A plus B projects did the low bidder bid the maximum number of days allowed. Also, there were incentives paid on every project except for the very last one. Here is another lesson learned. When you´re in an emergency situation with these kinds of contracts, don´t put your hard-nosed resident engineer out on the grade. What you need out there is a spirit of partnering. We didn´t have it on our last contract and it turned into a problem.
We did pay out a lot of incentives: $90 million in bid amount and $28 million in incentives. I think we got a pretty good deal. Contractors, this is not a bonus but an incentive.
The contractor that got so much publicity for winning the bid on the Santa Monica Freeway or the I-10 job, bid six or seven million dollars lower than the second low bidder. So all of that incentive wasn´t a bonus. It also paid for his ability to innovate. He chartered a train to haul his materials in from out of state. When asked about this contract, he explained that there was nothing he could do that would increase his cost by $200,000 a day (the incentive), even renting a train. If he didn´t use the train, he still had to pay for hauling over the highways. Renting the train saved him several days in his contract time so the additional cost over highway shipping was worth it. He got the $200,000 incentive for each day he saved, so it didn´t actually cost him that much. The high incentive/disincentive gives them contractors the latitude to do things differently.
We learned the incentive/disincentive amount has to be high. Our failure was a low amount on the Loma Prieta and earlier projects. After we raised them, we started getting results. On the chart that was shown to you earlier, most of the amounts were under $5,000. It may work in other areas but that range won´t work in California. We set a minimum of $5,000 now and we do use A plus B for non-emergency projects as well.
You need to set a maximum number of working days for contractors to base their bids on. It´s got to be tight but you´ve got to give them some flexibility. We estimated the number of working days in all of our projects, added a little bit to allow them some mobilization time, and gave them some for bidding room. It wasn´t much, 10 percent, 20 percent, so if we estimated 100 days we may put a maximum of 110 or 115 days. You need to start counting working days following award and spell out a specific time following award.
We did ten invitation only projects. As I told you, we established the list; worked off it; and we didn´t deviate from it. We established a rule that if a contractor was awarded a contract on an invitation bid, he could not bid on another contract of the same type. So if they got an invitation to bid for a bridge project, they would not be invited to bid on any more bridge projects. However, they would be able to bid on a highway-type project. Most of these projects were bridge-type projects. There are a lot of reasons why we wanted invitation only and it worked very well. The Gavin Canyon project proved that. We had to get information out to the contractors right away. On the Gavin Canyon project, we had one engineer assigned to each contractor. We had a central point for all questions to come in. When a question came in, we evaluated it and developed a response. These individuals who are responsible for the contractors called each contractor. They told the contractors what the question was and gave them the answer. This was followed up by a question and answer fax. Later we issued an electronic fax in the form of a contract addendum. We issued eight addenda on projects that were advertised for two and a half days. We were keeping the contractors informed continuously throughout the progress. They had a lot of questions. This situation was all new to them. Most of these projects were out for bids for less than four days.
Design sequencing is a term that we´re using right now in California. It means we´re releasing the project for bid prior to complete plans. We did four of them. The designs were fairly complete. Most of them were complete without the final check. There were some changes during construction as a result of the incomplete designs. We generally gave the contractors the final plans in 9 to 24 days. On the Gavin Canyon project, final plans were out nine days after we awarded the contract.
Let´s get into lessons learned. Glenn Clinton talked about the publication that was developed by the FHWA, industry, and CALTRANS. It´s very well written. Get the full report and read it. The executive summary is nice, but it really doesn´t give you the details that you need.
For progress payments, we needed to maintain the contractor´s cash flow. They were working the equivalent of three days for every day they were out there. Our normal progress payment is once a month. We reduced it to once every two weeks. We could have reduced it further but it´s a lot of work developing a progress payment and we didn´t want to divert our resources in doing it. We just wanted to keep money flowing to the contractors.
You also need to anticipate the kinds of emergency contract language you´re going to be using. Have those specifications ready to go, try them out on other projects, and just be prepared.
We weren´t that prepared. We had done a little bit but we had to do a lot of and work in two days to come up with final contract language. We refined it through the entire process.
If you´re going to do a same day award, you´ve to have the contractor present at the award and keep him there until the contract is awarded. You need the award team available for the award. They don´t have to be on the spot but they do need to be available. We do a lot of communications electronically by phone, by computer, and other means. You need access to whatever type of verification and approval sources such as the contractor´s license, the bonding companies, the DBE certifications, whether they´re in small business and all that kind of stuff. You have to have access to all this right away. You don´t have time to be tracking someone down.
You need to do actually go through an exercise from time to time. With staff turn over, the new people don´t know what the procedures are for the same-day award contracts. Also, the one´s that have been through it may have forgotten. We get plenty of emergency projects every year so we get plenty of hands-on work so we don´t have to have practice exercises. Use these different procedures periodically on non-emergency projects so everybody knows what they´re supposed to do when an emergency hits.
For same-day execution and approval, you need different people there who have the authority to bind the contractor by executing the contract. You also need a surety representative who can issue performance and payment bonds on the spot. You don´t want to have to learn all this for the first time when a real emergency hits.
Incidentally, we were awarding three same-day-award contracts and we did that for three consecutive days. On one of the days, we had five hearings for relief of bid for good faith hearing and for contractor substitution. So it wasn´t just going through the paperwork of an award, doing the checks, and analysis. There are other things you have to plan for. We implemented conference calling to conduct hearings so that we didn´t have to pull everybody into the same room. We faxed information and we initially, we had two conference phone pods running so we could have eight people on the line at one time. They talked from one phone to the other phone. We did it by the seat of the pants and we learned a lot by that experience. You can accomplish things very quickly by conference calls. Today, the technology is even better.
Preplanning, you have to know your legal authority. In emergency, the director of the California Department of Transportation has legal authority. It´s not absolute. Normally, we need a Governor´s executive order to allow us some freedom to accelerate the process even more than what we could do under the director´s authority.
You also need to know the FHWA authority. They don´t have absolute authority either. For example, it was mentioned by one of the speakers that they were free of environmental regulations. That´s not true. We addressed the environmental regulations by restoring the facility within the same footstep and within our right of way. We stayed within the area we had control of and we agreed to mitigate any environmental issues if needed. So we were not free of that. There are some other things that had not even occurred to us such as noise regulations, labor regulations, and trucking restrictions. The Governor actually signed six executive orders in order to free our hands and the contractors´ hands of some restrictions. On some of these, we ran into a crisis situation just trying to get the authority to allow us to do certain things. Try to get some agreement with the various agencies that you deal with before a disaster hits. We got agreements with the FHWA on our contracting processes. We relied on a previous agreement with FHWA developed during the Loma Prieta earthquake on how we would handle the DBE goals and good faith hearings.
If you go mobile and you need to plan for a command center, what kind of facilities do you need?
CALTRANS did not have an agreement with the airlines so our liaison person took charge and volunteered to use his personal credit card. Otherwise, we would have been stuck with a big problem. We reimbursed him later. Credit cards come in real handy for buying extra plane seats to move things back and forth around the state. We had to do a lot of other things using credit cards. So be sure your agency sets gets credit cards and sets up master accounts to charge your expenses to.
Right now we can relocate to any place in the world that has communications and conduct our operations electronically. We can publish the plans and specifications; send them electronically to the contractor instead of boxing them up and hauling them down there.
Communicating is the most important thing we do in our job. We communicate in different forms: by phone, fax, plans and specs is a form of communication, our advertisements, and our bid letting.
In January 1997, we had a road wash out that isolated a city. On the morning of January 22, we got a set of draft plans from our district regional office. By 6:30 that night, we completed plans and specs, published them, and took them to the damaged site. Eight o´clock the next morning, we met the contractors on the grade, gave them their bid packages, and did a walk-through. If a contractor didn´t show up, he wasn´t going to be allowed to bid. Now, this was not an invitation only bidding. We alerted all the contractors in the project area and it was up to them to be at the walk-through at eight o´clock. Between eight o´clock and one o´clock, we issued one addendum and then we opened the bids. Before evening, we awarded and executed the contract. It took us about 30 hours from the time we had a draft plan until the contractor started construction.
Communications is the theme here. We have installed remote video with satellite uplinks. We can go to the damaged site and send back video and photos for rapid assessment and development of plans and specs.
We also have made the plans, specs, and everything available on the internet so everyone has instantaneous access. They can print them and start using them while we´re completing the rest of the package for them.
We are planning to do on-line internet bidding. This is where they develop their bid, submit it, and pre-verify over the internet. For pre-verifying, we will verify the bid for the contractors; make sure they´re properly licensed; check that their DBEs are actually certified and a small business; and verify that the bonding company is allowed to practice in California and in fact, is the correct surety for the project. We can then proceed with the on-line award and execution. We will have instantaneous bid opening. The contractors can sit in the comfort of their homes, watch the bid opening, see the results, and take action if necessary. They won´t have to send bid runners. They can have multiple estimators working on the same project simultaneously instead of the way they´re doing it now. The purpose of all of this stuff is to allow us to respond quicker and more decisively in an emergency and get the contracts out as quickly as possible. All right, any questions?
FROM THE AUDIENCE: How did CALTRANS handle the contractors who were not invited to bid on these A plus B projects?
MR. MODE: When we issued the first one with only three people invited, we got what was the expected result. The rest of them called and wanted to know why they weren´t being allowed to bid. We faxed the questionnaire and fact sheets to 3,000 contractors on Friday morning and gave them until Friday afternoon to tell us if they wanted to be on the list for invitation-only bids. This was their only chance they had to declare themselves or they were out of it. Those who didn´t declare themselves in, didn´t call to complain about it. But we did get about 18. These were the bigger firms. The ones willing to take a risk of $150,000 a day incentive/disincentive, seven days a week, 24 hours a day-type contracts. So conditions discouraged most of them. They really weren´t interested in these contracts.
FROM THE AUDIENCE: Would CALTRANS be interested in sending a team of experts to advise and help somebody like New York City or other agency that was in a severe emergency?
MR. MODE: I´m quite sure CALTRANS would be very supportive of any agency that needed our help. I´m not sure what kind of team you´re talking about but yes. CALTRANS relies on other states. We were getting help from Nevada, Oregon, Arizona and other nearby states. We would do the same for anybody else who needed our assistance. Thank you.
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