By: Libi Uremovic | Original Article at patch.com
Libi,
Today the City of Beaumont provided a pre-bid walk through of their “state of the art” wastewater treatment facility to potential Operational and Maintenance contractors. The current contract operators “Utility Partners” contract is due to expire soon and it is time to rebid these services.
As part of due diligence for the Operations and Maintenance company I work for it brought me to some of your articles.
I do not know your experience regarding wastewater treatment processes but your insight into Beaumont not having a “state of the art” wastewater treatment facility is correct.
I have been in the water/wastewater treatment career field for 35 years. I possess a CA Grade V Wastewater Treatment Plant Operator license, CWEA Maintenance Technologist Grade IV, and CWEA Laboratory Analyst Grade I.
It is not likely that the company I work for will waste their time bidding for this contract.
Certain clues from the city staff indicate that the city is not willing to conduct due diligence on their part in actually looking for an operation and maintenance contractor for their facilities.
1.) Short timelines from the pre-bid walk through which was today (May 14, 10:00 am), to when the sealed bid is due (two weeks)(May 28,2015)
At a minimum it should be 30 to 60 days.
2) NO Pictures to be taken of the facility. (Of course IF your a terrorist and plan to sabotage the facility I could see their point 😉 However you would not have been able to capture the dead bird floating in the effluent stream of their filters, the chipping paint on their clarifiers, or other operation and maintenance issues that you figure would have been corrected BEFORE allowing a tour.
3) In the Pre-Bid documents the City is requiring specific CA grade certifications that do not match facility requirements. From my experiences these requests could be “current contractor” specific items that limit other outside contractors from the bidding process.
4) One item requesting the new contractor to have experience operating a “Biolac” treatment system is absurd. Their process is considered conventional activated sludge and is no different to operate than any other activated sludge process. The only reason communities go with this type system is price. It is cheap to install but can become expensive to operate over time.
If you would like further information regarding wastewater treatment do not hesistate to call.
Thanks for your time.