By Megan Kelley

Review Writer

Continuing with series one of bond work as well as sinking fund projects, the Lake Orion school board approved bid awards for projects involving the new Early Childhood Center and Webber Elementary School as well as district mechanical commissioning, furniture and playground equipment.

According to district documents, LOCS received 222 bids on 66 contracts.

The contracts awarded and approved by the school board totaled $22,298,578, with the additional allowance and contingency costs of $3,501,656, for a grand total of $25,800,234.

Assistant Superintendent of Business and Finance John Fitzgerald also took the opportunity to explain the process of bidding and in what situations the lowest bid would not be selected.

“It’s a public bidding process, it’s all scripted by law in terms of access to publishing access in the process,” Fitzgerald said. “With respect to our vendors, we do direct conversations before and after the actual bid opening and then post bid interviews. If there’s questions, concerns, reasons why someone was not selected, that information is exchanged at that point.

“We as a district do have a right to select the lowest qualified bidder.

“So in terms of that, we may not select the lowest qualified bid for a couple reasons: if we know that the individual, by looking at and doing an analysis of the individual that’s actually making the bid along with the bid itself, a typical red flag that would make us raise our eyebrows is if the amount they’re paying for their bid bond for their project is materially higher than everybody else’s, that’s an indicator of potential financial issues of that vendor; if the bid itself is an outlier, sometimes it comes down to a judgment issue.

“If you know of legal issues, publicly known about situations that the person’s involved with.

So that may or may not work into the case but as a rule we do go with the lowest bidder but we still hold up to the threshold of, if we have a history with them that is not well, we will not select them, if there’s some other red flags like that high bid bonds associated,” Fitzgerald said.

Bond work is expected to proceed as contracted outside and on already existing sites, according to LOCS communications.

Online: lakeorionschools.org.