More Bidding Problems With 90 Bridge St.

CHATHAM – In order to preserve access to state grant funds, officials authorized the purchase of only a portion of the equipment needed for the new shellfish upweller at 90 Bridge St. after problems emerged with the latest round of bids for the project.

While the second round of bidding for the seawater systems for the upweller — pumps and other equipment to circulate seawater for growing shellfish — resulted in lower amounts than the previous round, officials opted not to make an award and instead to move forward with a redesign of the system.

Shellfish propagation equipment that will be needed for the upweller regardless of the type of seawater system will be supplied by Dura-Tech Industrial and Marine Limited at $510,055. The funds will come from a state Department of Agriculture Resources Food Security Infrastructure grant that must be spent by July 1. The select board approved the contract June 23.

The state allowed the town to spend 75 percent of the grant while retaining the remaining 25 percent for later appropriation, said Natural Resources Director Greg Berman. 

“So we don’t lose the money,” Berman said. The equipment includes tanks and silos as well as a generator, which added up to 75 percent of the $730,600 grant.

Of the three bids received for the seawater system, the lowest was from Moving Waters, Inc. at $1,063,100. A previous round of bidding produced just one bid of more than $2 million. Last year the town’s consultants estimated the system would cost just under $1.5 million. Market price escalations are largely responsible for the higher costs, Berman said.

Town counsel recommended the Moving Waters bid be rejected due to discrepancies in the bidding documents. While the town’s consultants recommended awarding the bid to the next highest bidder, N&M Excavating, town staff favored redesigning the system instead in order to lower costs.

Berman recommended revamping the planned system to use multiple submersible pumps rather than a single land-based pump, as called for in the original upweller design. That should result in “significant cost savings” because some equipment would no longer be necessary, and the submersible pumps are less expensive than the land-based pump. While the redesign will require additional engineering costs and several months of design time, it should not impact the schedule, Berman said. Lead time for the submersible pumps is shorter than for the land-based pump, so the upweller should be online next spring, as originally planned.

Work is now underway on renovations to the former Stage Island Coast Guard boathouse, which will house the upweller. The select board recently awarded that contract to Robert B. Our of Harwich at $2.2 million. The entire Bridge Street project, including revetment construction, dredging, new piers and docks and the boathouse and upweller will come to approximately $11.9 million, with $3.8 million from state grants and the rest from community preservation funds and waterfront infrastructure bonds. About $1.5 million remains in the budget, Berman said.

The expected reduced costs with the redesign of the seawater system should get the cost below the remaining funding, Berman said.

He said there was always some skepticism about the land-based pump called for in the original design. The redesign will look more like the current system, which uses three submersible pumps, two of which operate to bring fresh seawater into the shellfish grow-out tanks, with the third as a backup. This allows the water to continue to flow while a pump is defouled, said Shellfish Constable Rene Gagne.

“It would really be replicated what we have now without the bells and whistles,” she said. “It’s just really how you get the water into the building that we’re redesigning.”

Berman suggested the land pump system may have scared off some bidders and the new design may result in more competitive bids.

“We hope the price will be less, but there’s no guarantees,” he said.

The submersible pumps require annual maintenance, Gagne said, a cost that tripled after the New Bedford firm that previously handled the job stopped doing the work and the pumps had to be sent to another company in Boston. The department hopes to train in-house personnel to do the work instead, she said, to create additional cost savings.

Select board member Stuart Smith, the town’s former harbormaster, said he felt the original design was “over-engineered” and he endorsed the shift to submersible pumps.

“It is a good project, but I implore you to put some realism into some of those things the engineers try to spec,” he said.