Recently the City of Victoria issued a revised Request For Proposals (RFP) to the three companies bidding on the project — and the new document increases risks to taxpayers, and may produce a bridge different from the one shown in pre-referendum advertising. In Section 4.3(c) of the original RFP, the companies had to submit a fixed price to build the bridge. Now they may submit a “not to exceed” price, which the City can try to negotiate down to a fixed price later on. In Section 4.3(a) of the original RFP, the companies could only propose “optimizations” to the bridge architecture. Now, a new provision — Section 4.5, Design Build — lets the companies assume “technical design responsibility for the complete project,” and have their own engineers design the bridge. [...]
