Low minority, women participation drive officials to get new bids from KCI contractors
Officials will seek best and final offers from two competing construction firms hoping for a piece of work on the new single terminal at Kansas City International Airport, the City Council decided Thursday.
Members voted 10-2-1 to direct city staffers to reject a bid from ESCO Construction, of Colorado, and ask ESCO and its local competitor, Ideker, Inc., of St. Joseph, to submit again.
At issue was whether the terminal’s developer, Edgemoor Infrastructure & Real Estate, and general contractor, Clark Weitz Clarkson, selected a company with enough subcontracting firms owned by minorities and women. Those firms are known through the city’s program as minority business enterprises and women business enterprises, or M/WBEs.
When City Council members pitched the idea of a new KCI terminal to voters in 2017, they promised a project that would be transformative for minority and women businesses seeking opportunities. To that end, Edgemoor pledged that 35% of the work on the $1.5 billion terminal would be done by M/WBEs.
Critics of ESCO’s bid said it did not have enough M/WBE participation. Some of them wanted the city to hire Ideker, which had a slightly higher bid but a team with more M/WBEs.
Councilman Kevin O’Neill, 1st District at-large, said the KCI project had given enough contracts to out-of-town firms.
“This is an opportunity that I think we have to send a message,” O’Neill said. “When bids are close, we would like to see it go local.’
In the City Council meeting, members couldn’t seem to agree on how much M/WBE participation the firms had. They said ESCO’s bid included more than $20 million in participation by a WBE and $3 million by one or more MBEs.
Council members presented conflicting information regarding Ideker’s M/WBE participation, but supporters of the legislation believed Ideker’s bid to be superior in terms of that issue.
“This isn’t, for me, about giving it from one company to the next,” said Councilwoman Melissa Robinson, 3rd District. “This is, for me, about getting the final and best offer to ensure that we have an equitable share of MBEs and WBEs.”
Ideker could not immediately be reached for comment after business hours on Thursday.
Neither the companies’ bids nor their M/WBE participation could be independently verified by The Star because CWC said it cannot release the data while the company is still in a closed procurement process. Edgemoor’s managing director, Geoff Stricker, declined to provide those specifics after a committee meeting on Wednesday “out of respect for the integrity of the procurement process and the fact that this specific bid is currently under review.”
ESCO’s bid was slightly less expensive, supporters and critics say.
Councilwoman Teresa Loar, who chairs the Transportation, Infrastructure and Operations Committee, voted against the legislation in committee Wednesday and on the council floor Thursday.
“I feel this is kind of a slippery slope if we start doing this and just don’t want to get in the habit of getting into these bids,” said Loar, 2nd District at-large.
Councilman Lee Barnes, 5th District at-large, joined Loar. Councilman Brandon Ellington abstained. The remaining nine members of the City Council and Mayor Quinton Lucas voted for the legislation.
