Row erupts over parking ramp bidding process.
State Supreme Court Justice Richard C. Kloch Sr. on Thursday ordered a hearing on how the bidding for the demolition of Lockport’s downtown parking ramp was botched April 5.
Kloch accused the attorney for the city of costing taxpayers $190,000 through a pedantic reading of the law on competitive bidding.
The city rejected a bid from Scott Lawn Yard of Sanborn because it was delivered about 40 minutes after the 2 p.m. deadline April 5. The Common Council, on the advice of Corporation Counsel John J. Ottaviano, awarded the contract April 10 to Empire Dismantlement of Grand Island for $1,177,000.
Scott Lawn obtained a temporary restraining order to block work, claiming that a city employee told its courier to take his bid, not to City Hall as the bid documents directed, but to the downtown Buffalo office of Conestoga-Rovers & Associates, the engineering firm that designed the work.
By the time Scott Lawn employee Christopher Juliano made it back to City Hall, he had missed the deadline. But two CRA engineers at City Hall opened his bid anyway and found it was the lowest.
“I’m really confused,” Kloch told Ottaviano in court Thursday. “All you have to do is nothing, and you save the City of Lockport $190,000, or – I figured it out – $9 for every man, woman and child in Lockport.”
Read more here.
