Re:Oroville Dam: Cost to repair spillways nearly doubles in ...
by yrb on Saturday October 21, 2017 @10:25PM
(#15524813)
How do you specify the contract so the unknown unknowns can be priced into the bid and compared to each other. Given that resolving those unknowns costs about as much as the just doing the actual work.
Re:Oroville Dam: Cost to repair spillways nearly doubles in ...
by JumpCrisscross on Saturday October 21, 2017 @10:30PM
(#15524830)
You temporarily re-open bidding when big price changes are requested. See my other comment [1].
Re:Oroville Dam: Cost to repair spillways nearly doubles in ...
by fencepost on Sunday October 22, 2017 @01:06AM
(#15525245)
That sounds like a recipe for delays and finger pointing along with massive overruns on the later parts "to fix what those other guys didn't do our way."
If you want separate bidding for separate phases, bid it out that way.
Re:Oroville Dam: Cost to repair spillways nearly doubles in ...
by arethuza on Sunday October 22, 2017 @05:34AM
(#15525901)
I suspect this would just make all projects much more expensive - bidding for a large project costs a lot of money and can require large teams of people working for extended periods of time. All of that gets paid for out of the projects that are won.
If you now introduce scenarios where projects can have an unknown number of bidding processes all costs will go up to cover the work necessary for multiple companies to prepare bids.
It would just make things much much worse.
I'm criticizing a system that incentives optimistic initial bids that are later revised up. A bad system doesn't need bad actors to produce bad outcomes. A $275 million bid ballooning to $500 million without any competitive pressure is a bad outcome.
American infrastructure costs are higher than production factors, e.g. land, material and labour cost differentials, explain [1]. Our auction mechanics are called out by experts as a big part of the problem.
[1] http://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/content/blog/is-u.s.-infrastr...