ZIWA, WITH $72,000 HIGHER BID, STILL GOT $4.04 MM JOB

By Juan Montoya
Now we know why back in the February board meeting of the Brownsville Independent School District trustees were handed an evaluation sheet on an item allowing Superintendent Esperanza Zendejas to negotiate a $4.04 million building contract that contained no dollar numbers.

If the backup to the item would have contained dollar numbers, they would have known that the BISD administration was recommending that the trustees award the lucrative contract to a firm – ZIWA Corporation – whose bid was fourth from the lowest and would cost BISD taxpayers $72,000 more that the lowest bidder (see graphic at right).

The board ended up approving the motion by trustee Joe Rodriguez 3-1 – after emerging from executive session – to authorize Zendejas to negotiate with Ziwa Corporation to build the Porter Early College High School Fine Arts Building.

That despite the fact that the item was in the open meeting section of the agenda.

Trustee Phil Cowen stormed out of the meeting after the item was called for a vote and did not vote. He said that Zendejas had agreed to table the item and that there would be no vote.

And trustee Dr. Sylvia Atkinson, also assured that Zendejas would table the item, left immediately after the closed session. The majority ignored  Zendejas' recommendation that the item be tabled. The only thing that the backup to the  item to guide the trustees in making the $4.04 million decision on the Porter Early College High School Fine Arts Building contained was the ranking criteria used by the district's evaluators.

"The disparity was huge," said a board watcher. "Trustee (Philip) Cowen became unglued because they didn't get the hard numbers in the backup, but showed them to the board on the night of the meeting."

Now we know how "huge" that disparity was. Three trustees voted to give away $72,000 of the district taxpayer dollars on suspect evaluations by the administration.

This is the convoluted reasoning by the evaluators:

The price category carried a maximum score of 60, construction experience 15, construction team and subcontractors 10, company's professionalism and subcontractors 10, construction performance 25, and financial strength 20 for a maximum possible score of 140.

As far as price category, "or best value," D. Wilson Construction scored the maximum 60, Wil-Con LLC followed with 59.66, E-Con Group scored 59.46 and Ziwa came in fourth with a 58.56.

Overall, Ziwa scored 133.96 of a possible 140, D.Wilson Construction 120.8, Wil-Con LLC 115.68, and E-Con Group 123.46.

Although Ziwa came in fourth in the price ranking, the final scores including the other five categories placed them over the others. Ziwa, for example, got a 14.8 of a possible 15 for company experience from the evaluators. How the evaluators gave Ziwa, founded in 1996, a higher score than D. Wilson (13), which has been in business since 1957 and has offices in the Rio Grande Valley and in San Antonio and was named one of the top 100 construction companies in Texas, is anyone's guess.

That ranking alone placed it over D. Wilson, the lowest bidder.

The same applied to the other four categories aside from price. Ziwa nearly maxed on:

*construction team and subcontractors: 9.4 of a possible 10
*professionalism (?): 9.6 of a possible 10
*performance: 22.8 of a possible 25 and
*financial strength: 18.8 of a possible 20

In fact, BISD evaluators ranked Ziwa above the other lower-bidding firms on the five categories aside from the price categories, erasing its disadvantage on price. Among some of the criteria used by the evaluators in the categories were such subjective measures as quality of work, conflict resolution and performance, litigation history, subcontractors' reputation, and payment of bills, among others.

The financial strength category bears some scrutiny because Ziwa – which claims construction experience her and in Mexico – is said to be owned by Sergio Arguelles, the so-called Maquila King of northern Tamaulipas who has vast real estate holdings in Rancho Viejo.

With Atkinson adn Cowen gone, only trustee Minerva Peña voted against it.

Cowen later apologized to Facilities Administrator Lieck for suggesting that bid rigging was taking place and threatening to call a press conference and going to the FBI.

Trustee Carlos Elizondo was absent from the meeting.

"The district has to improve its procurement process," Cowen said later. "I agree that while we have to have the best value, we also have to have quality.  It's the process that counts. We have to have transparency."

The BISD is allowed to have a 5 percent leeway in cost for projects for local vendors, but this was never mentioned by any of the trustees during the meeting. The others said they had full faith in Ziwa and that it was "a fine company."

(El Rrun-Rrun made a public information request to the BISD to acquire the bid price for the nine qualifying firms, including NM Contracting, which rescinded its bid after bid opening. We made the request Feb. 15, but was only yesterday that we finally got the information requested. BISD apparently does not count Charro Days as "working days" within the context of 10 working days in the Texas Open Records Act.)