re: Bourbon street construction nearly 3x over budget

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I've ran into this situation many times. It's good to have someone do a good scope of work and then either yourself or some technical people be able to sift through a bid and be able to identify what someone may have missed.

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Why would you ever submit a bid without a technical review?

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I've had two projects in the last few years where a low bidder came in WAY lower than anyone else.

In one case, I talked to the low bidder and asked him how confident he was in his bid, made sure he knew the full scope of the project. He had completely left off a large portion of the work and withdrew his bid. Why he was bidding without a full understanding of the work is beyond me, but at least we caught it ahead of time. He would have gone belly up and we'd have had to use his bonding company to finish the job.

In the other case, all the research indicated the company could handle the work, and they were confident in their bid, so we awarded the contract. Job is still going, but there have been no issues and costing 1/3 of the second highest bid.

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Thanks for the insight. From an outsider looking in, it's hard for someone to see a 4x gap, but I guess it can happen.

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So whats the legal ramifications of underbidding a project so bad that it makes it seem like this was intentional?

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Depends on what kind of entity is cutting the contract. Is it a fedgov, state, local, etc. They all have different T's and C's and different legal ramifications they can pursue.

I'm with LCHBOX in that I doubt this company did too low of a bid in purpose.

The biggest commercial project that I saw go south was when I played a small part of a job that Northrop Grumman was doing at a shipyard building commercial oil freighters.
NG took over the deal when they bought out another company. They ended up eating something like $100 million over the last two ships that were built and delivered.

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Why would you ever submit a bid without a technical review?

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I didn't submit one, just received crappy ones.

Mom and pops a lot of the time wanted to step up to some bigger things and just didn't know what they were doing.

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So whats the legal ramifications of underbidding a project so bad that it makes it seem like this was intentional?

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From my experience working procurement on the government side, there would be no legal ramification for the business underbidding (as in submitting a quote) so much that it seems intentional; however, if you were a contracting officer and signed a contract with this company you could (and should) have your warrant to do business on behalf of the government terminated.

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Bourbon street construction nearly 3x over budget

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Noooooo, are you sure? Louisiana is usually on time and on budget in everything we do.

There he is. LOL

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if you were a contracting officer and signed a contract with this company you could (and should) have your warrant to do business on behalf of the government terminated

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Correct and if that Contractor is more than 10% or so below the Independent Government Estimate, they are required to have the Contractor certify their estimate which means "Don't come at me Bro".

I cannot believe this. No way is the fine efficiently run New Orleans government responsible for this. Must be the Fed's fault

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Bourbon strip clubs

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and "lewd acts."

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This just doesn't seem possible.