Construction on the long-awaited Highway 12 sidewalks and streetlights project won’t start as soon as county officials originally thought. That’s because the project will have to be rebid as a result of county planning errors.
The original bids were opened on April 23, but last week letters went out to the four bidders that all bids were being rejected.
Susan Klassen, the county’s Transportation and Public Works director, said that while the bids were being analyzed, some issues arose.
“We discovered that we made some errors in our plans with some of the quantities,” she said. “During our analysis, we started seeing some anomalies that made us go back and check our quantities.”
Klassen called it “unfortunate,” and said she hopes it won’t delay the project significantly.
“We have to make corrections in our plans,” she said. “And that will take us a couple of weeks. Then we have to advertise (the project) again.”
She couldn’t put a timeline on it, but with at least two weeks making corrections on the plans, and another 30-day bid cycle, it could be late June or sometime in July before the supervisors act on the new set of bids. Once the winning bid is accepted, the contractor has 90 days to start, which could push the start of construction to sometime this fall.
“We’re trying to do this as quickly as we can,” Klassen said.
The county estimated the cost of the project, which included sidewalks, streetlights, gutters and curbs and a left-hand-turn lane on Highway 12 from Boyes Boulevard to Agua Caliente Road, to be almost $5 million. Ghilotti Construction came in with the low bid of $4.5 million, O.C. Jones & Sons came in at $5.35 million, Argonaut Constructors bid was $5.36 million while Ghilotti Brothers, Inc. bid $5.8 million.
The county still has to receive an encroachment permit from Caltrans before the work can begin, but part of the encroachment permit is paperwork on the winning bidder.
“We need the encroachment permit because the county is making improvements on the state right-of-way,” she said. “And Caltrans needs to review everything.”
Caltrans has to certify all the proper environmental work, proper CEQA documents and coordination with the utilities, among other things.
“This is a complex project,” Klassen said. “Caltrans needs to review everything thoroughly.”
The permit process isn’t a slam dunk. The county has to submit documentation, Caltrans reviews and comments, the county resubmits and Caltrans does additional reviewing until it is satisfied with the project.
Klassen said the project, by law, would have to go to the lowest responsible bidder.
The county was a couple of months shy of putting the Highway 12 project out to bid in early 2012. But a decision by the state Supreme Court in December 2011 dissolved all of the state’s redevelopment agencies, including the Sonoma County Redevelopment Agency that was using redevelopment money to fund Highway 12 as it constructed the first phase.
At that point, everything stalled, and it wasn’t until late 2012 when the county’s board of supervisors allocated $450,000 to complete design work that the project started up again.
In May of last year, the supervisors approved a measure to transfer an estimated $24.5 million, between then and the 2016-17 fiscal year, to finish projects that were left up in the air when the county’s redevelopment agency was dissolved in February 2012. The funding will be money from the state that would have gone to the redevelopment agency.
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