County will rescore bridge consulting firms

By ALBERTO TOMAS HALPERN

PRESIDIO COUNTY – Presidio County commissioners agreed last Thursday to a set of guidelines in selecting a consulting and construction firm for the expansion of the international bridge linking Presidio and Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico.

Commissioners voted in November to enter into negotiations with the McAllen firm, S&B Infrastructure. Confusion over the scoring method used by commissioners prompted two other firms in the running, Structural Engineering Associates and Raba-Kistner, to object to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDoT), which must sign off on the deal before construction can begin.

Presidio County Judge Paul Hunt came up with a set procedure to fairly score the three firms seeking to work on the project. Hunt received TxDoT’s approval on the guidelines. He just needed to get commissioners to agree to it as well.

“My feeling is that this reflects the right order, just to get TxDoT’s blessing,” Hunt told commissioners.

“I don’t understand. We voted last time, so leave it that way,” Commissioner Carlos Armendariz said.

Hunt explained that commissioners could disagree with TxDoT and take another approach.

“You can say to TxDoT that we disagree and I’ll have your back,” Hunt said, “We’ll have to appeal to the federal authority to go over TxDoT’s head.”

“I think we should comply with what TxDoT wants us to do,” Commissioner Eloy Aranda told commissioners. “I just don’t want to come back and wait three more months and go through the same process.”

Under the new scoring procedure, which is essentially what commissioners did back in November, minus the re-scoring and confusion, the commissioners court will remain as the selection committee and will use a new score sheet. The firms will be limited to the original three that applied initially, and the revised scoring process will provide for the individual selection team member’s scores to be consolidated into one score for each of the firms, using a truncated average in which the high and low scores are thrown out for each responder and then calculating the mean of the remaining individual selection team member’s scores for each responder.

In the guidelines, commissioners have the option to take no action if commissioners believe that the re-scoring was done using unapproved criteria or a distortion of the scores is apparent.

“I’m going to make the motion to use the truncated method to throw out low and high scores,” Aranda said.

“I second,” Commissioner Frank ‘Buddy’ Knight said quickly.

“Let’s get at it,” Armendariz said.

Commissioners voted unanimously to approve the new method.

Commissioners will likely re-score the firms at their next regular meeting.