Firms hoping to build the airport raised their DBE pledges
11th August 2014 · 0 Comments
By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer
Late last week, the Hunt Gibbs Boh Metro team beat out NOLA Airport Builders in scoring by a newly appointed evaluation committee for $546 million to build Louis Armstrong Airport’s north terminal. When asked, NOLA Airport Builders didn’t express immediate interest in contesting HGBM’s score of 822 versus its 787 rating. NAB has 10 days to challenge the results. The scoring followed efforts by both sides this summer to raise their commitments to Disadvantaged Business Enterprises or DBEs—typically firms owned by minorities and women.
The last bids, scored in late May, were tossed partly because HGBM complained about its rating on DBE participation. After that, both teams added a nonprofit to their side to assist with DBE matters. Under the airport’s request for proposals, 36.49 percent of construction management and pre-construction and 33.09 percent of the project’s construction work should be by DBEs.
Earlier, HGBM protested that it was unfairly treated in late-May scoring because of a misunderstanding over the DBE status of Metro Service Group, which had changed its name from Metro Disposal. The evaluation committee gave HGBM a lower DBE score then than its rival. Soon after the late-May vote, however, Metro received confirmation of its DBE certification from the state.
Another reason the May scores were scrapped was that two evaluators rated each team equally in the “cost” category though HGBM’s construction plan was less expensive than Parson Odebrecht’s, which has since rebranded itself as NOLA Airport Builders.
The HGBM team consists of Hunt Construction in Indianapolis, and New Orleans-based Gibbs Construction, Boh Brothers Construction and Metro Service Group. Over the summer, the only real change in HGBM was that it partnered with Good Work Network, a nonprofit founded in 2001 and located on O.C. Haley Blvd., helping minority- and women-owned ventures. “Gibbs Construction has worked with GWN for several years and strongly believes in its mission and value to the community,” Chris Herting, an HGBM spokesman working for Beuerman Miller Fitzgerald Inc. in New Orleans, said last week.
Creating a second round of proposals this summer gave HGBM time to enhance its DBE program, Herting said. GWN assists disadvantaged businesses with accounting, cash flow, project management, pricing and marketing. In 2010, GWN launched ConnectWorks, which has helped 42 firms land $16 million in private and public contracts to date.
As part of its airport proposal, HGBM plans to start a Community Workforce Development Program, offering construction, carpentry and electrical training, along with certified apprenticeships. HGBM’s proposal also includes DBE mentoring, to be led by Xavier business professor Mark Quinn, who holds the Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship.
In recent months, the team combining California-based Parsons Construction with Odebrecht USA, the Florida unit of a Brazilian conglomerate, has changed. In June, the group elevated African American-owned Royal Engineers & Consultants in New Orleans from subcontractor to contractor. And this summer the team partnered with the Urban League of Greater New Orleans. Under its new name of NOLA Airport Builders, the group no longer includes locally based Woodward Design + Build and Nolmar Corp., which is associated with Woodward. But it is partnered with local firms Campo Architects, Circular Consulting, GOTECH Inc., The Hale Group LLC, ILSI Engineering and Vali Cooper International.
Partners working for NOLA Airport Builders, including the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, are compensated for their professional services, Odebrecht spokeswoman Thais Reiss said last week.
Woodward left the Parson Odebrecht venture in June as a controversy escalated about an earlier, race-related lawsuit against the builder. When the suit, filed in 2010, went into arbitration later, claims of discrimination were dismissed. “We pulled out of the airport construction consortium this summer so as not to be a distraction to what’s truly important—finding the most qualified firms to successfully complete this project on budget and on schedule,” Woodward’s president Paul Flower said last week. The project is significant for the region’s economic future, he said. Airport construction is expected to create more than 13,000 jobs, and the terminal is to be completed by March 2018 for the city’s tricentennial.
As for NOLA Airport Builders, “they sought us out,” Erika McConduit-Diggs, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, said last week. “It’s better to work on the inside than the outside.” The League partnered with Royal Engineers on a past construction project. “But it’s not about who the airport construction contractor is,” she said. “It’s about how the League positions ourselves to maximize assistance to DBEs and the job seekers we help.”
NOLA Airport Builders and HGBM both include a number of local firms, McConduit noted. “Regardless of who wins the contract, we’re devoted to the DBE community and want greater opportunities for them and for job seekers,” she said. In late September, the League plans to open a contractors’ resource center on South Claiborne and Cleveland avenues, outfitted with a planning room, graphic plotters, and a computer lab with accounting and other software.
Bonding capacity and project size are among the challenges that DBEs face. “If you can increase your bonding capacity, you increase your work,” McConduit said. As for sizing, “maybe a DBE can’t build four floors but it can build one or two of them.”
Nearly half of the city’s African-American men aren’t working, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. School dropouts and former prison inmates, including people returning to the workforce through NOLA for Life, are among the job seekers the League assists, McConduit said. In late June, Mayor Mitch Landrieu unveiled the City’s NOLA For Life reentry strategy to help former inmates find jobs.
Labor rights group Stand with Dignity and other organizations wanted HGBM and NOLA Airport Builders this summer to participate in proposal grading based on a living wage; hiring local workers, including former prisoners; and workplace safety. But the bidders were reluctant to do so.
While DBEs are in the airport construction spotlight, they have been a fairly modest part of the evaluation committee’s total scoring. Under the rules, evaluators last week scored the two rivals’ proposals for a possible 100 points, with a maximum 40 points for staff qualifications, staffing plan and prior experience; 25 points for approach and methodology; 15 points for history, organization and financial condition; 10 points for costs and 10 points for DBEs. The evaluators’ scores were added Thursday to arrive at a final score.
The evaluation committee’s members, named last month, are Matt Atlier, assistant vice chancellor for facilities and planning at Delgado Community College; Jeff Hebert, executive director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority; Barry Hickman, senior manager in Louisiana’s Division of Administration; Derrick Muse, the city’s deputy director of finance and treasury; Curtis Rich, chief inspector for aviation in Louisiana’s Department of Transportation and Development; Ken Schwartz, Dean of Tulane’s School of Architecture; Vincent Smith, the city’s capital projects director; Kevin Spruell, the New Orleans Aviation Board’s airport engineer; and Michelle Wilcut, NOAB’s deputy director.
Last week, McConduit-Diggs said the National Urban League saw no conflict with ULGNO’s participation in NOLA Airport Builders. “ULGNO’s role to help monitor DBE participation, increase outreach, provide DBE capacity-building services and assist with workforce development is squarely within the mission of the Urban League and consistent with prior work performed in the UL movement,” she said.
This article originally published in the August 11, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
