Commissioners waive bidding process; continue to work with utilities

Members of the Presque Isle County Board of Commissioners agreed to waive the usual bidding procedure for the proposed high wire corridor at their meeting Friday and approved an addendum to a construction contract with Presque Isle Electric & Gas Co-op. The expected work on the corridor, which will move electric, cable, and telephone lines to higher positions on utility poles from Onaway to Rogers City is going out for bids, but in a way that is being called unusual in terms of a typical county project.

?Rather than this being a public utility, the electric lines, the phone lines, and the cable TV lines are all privately owned,? said Mary Ann Heidemann, County Development Commission director. ?Each of those utilities handles repairs, upgrades, and changes to those lines in-house with their own selected group of contractors.?

HEIDEMANN SAID if it were a county-owned utility, the county would follow a competitive bid process. ?We don?t own those utilities and we must allow the utility owners to proceed under their normal processes,? said Heidemann. PIE & G, which far and away will have the most work needing to be done, does its competitive bids within a pre-selected group of contractors who are familiar with the company?s electric lines and system, and are highly qualified in the area of electrical construction, Heidemann said.

The CDC director attended a pre-bid meeting at PIE & G last week with a number of PIE & G contractors present. ?I?m sure we are going to get…very competitive bids from this pre-selected group,? said Heidemann. The cable and telephone companies will be handling changes through preferred contractors. ?We have to let the owners of the wires do what they need to do,? she said.

THE PROPOSED corridor route, which will be used to ship large loads of freight from Moran Iron Works, travels south of Onaway, then east, eventually ending up at the deep port of Calcite in Rogers City. The county is administering a $400,000 grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation on behalf of Moran, with the Onaway company providing a $40,000 match. In discussing the situation with county prosecutor Don McLennan, Heidemann was advised to request the board officially waive the bid policy for the project. Normally the electric/utility would have a two-party contract with its selected construction firm, but PIE & G will not be paying for the work. The county, with its grant funding, will. Any cost exceeding $400,000 will be covered by Moran. Heidemann told the commissioners the PIE & G attorney wanted to get that part of the agreement in writing. So, in addition to the Rural Utility Contract, the board ap

proved the addendum.

?I THINK IT?S actually a brilliant way around the contracting issues,? said Heidemann. The only problem the prosecutor?s office had was the 15 day turn-around to pay bills. A 30-day time period is preferable by the county and was recommended as a change to the addendum. ?We would send that letter back to PIE & G, including an official request to alter their utility lines and a suggestion that that one term in the addendum be changed,? said Heidemann. ?Nothing will be contracted for until we get firm prices from all of the utilities and assess the project before we give the go-ahead.?

?We are not going to enter into any of these contracts until we have firm prices on all of them. But the addendum approach for the Presque Isle work seems to be reasonable.? The other utilities are going to do the work in-house. The engineer for the project has asked for a written estimate from the utilities.

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