Skip to main content
A week after Portland Public Schools announced its selection of Texas-based construction firm to manage the rebuilding of three high schools, a runner-up filed a formal protest of the choice.
If approved by the board, PPS will pay Texas-based Procedeo about $61 million over the next five years.
Under the contract, Procedeo would provide “comprehensive professional program and project management services” for the $1.83 billion bond passed by voters in May, according to the soliciting bids. That includes overseeing bond-funded construction projects, among them three high school modernizations at Cleveland, Ida B. Wells and Jefferson, to ensure they are completed on schedule and within budget.
New documents obtained by WW show the protest from the second-place firm, Atlanta-based Turner & Townsend Heery, which has an outlet in Lake Oswego and competed with Procedeo across both a written evaluation and interview round to try and win the competitive contract. In a Nov. 24 letter to Paul Williams, the district’s senior solicitations manager, TTH president Robert Chomiak alleged PPS’s evaluators had failed to objectively consider proposals and that the interview round had been influenced by a Procedeo employee who is already working for the district and was present for interviews.
In a Nov. 26 response to TTH, Williams wrote that PPS did not find a basis for the protest, disputing the allegations that the district had not reviewed the proposals objectively. He also wrote that the Procedeo employee had only been present in her capacity as a bidder in the Procedeo interview, similar to full time TTH employees who were there to present on behalf of that firm.
It’s a rare move for TTH to protest a procurement award, Chomiak wrote—the first the firm has filed in about 40 years. But on Nov. 24 Chomiak called for the district to reject all offers, make revisions and re-issue and re-advertise the request for proposal.
“We participate in many procurements around the U.S. and understand that we win many and lose some as well. Losing in a fair and open procurement is part of the business and we accept that fact,” Chomiak wrote. “However, losing in a biased procurement lacking in good faith and inconsistent with Oregon law is not something that we can accept and ignore.”
Part of the tension is also that TTH has more than 35 years of experience in the Portland area—the firm has a branch in Lake Oswego—whereas Procedeo is new to the area, having taken on an increasing amount of work for PPS since summer.
At the core of TTH’s first basis for protest are two issues. The first is that the district presented the written and interview rounds as equal weight, when in reality the former was weighted with 100 points and the latter with 110. The second was a protest of scores from one evaluator, Dana White, PPS’s senior director of real estate and construction, who scored TTH a zero on “program management planning” in the interview and gave Procedeo a perfect 10.
That was in contrast to other members of the evaluation committee, who scored TTH between a five and an 8.75 in that category.
“A zero is an impossible score, perhaps only achievable by not turning in materials or appearing at the interview,” Chomiak wrote, adding it’s similarly difficult to receive perfect 10s in the way Procedeo did. “But TTH’s proposal, having been deemed a responsive proposal, should have garnered some kind of numerical score, if even a 1.”
Williams shot down both of those arguments, noting that a protest of problems within the request for proposals document could be submitted no later than seven calendar days before the date proposals were due, not after the award period. (And he noted that the outcome would have been the same either way.)
Williams also wrote that in order to challenge scoring, TTH would have needed to prove that all the higher-ranked proposers failed to meet the requirements of the RFP or that those higher ranked proposers are not qualified to perform the services described in the RFP. He added that because White had left a comment about her low ranking, there was reasoning provided for the score. (“I didn’t think they presented a plan at the program level. It was very much a project specific approach,” she had written.)
“A disagreement with the good-faith evaluations and scoring of the evaluation team is not a valid basis for a protest, particularly in the absence of any evidence of bias or conflict of interest,” Williams wrote. “Nor can TTH or PPS reasonably infer bias or lack of objectivity simply from the fact that, in one evaluator’s independent judgement, TTH’s proposal did not merit points in a particular evaluation category.”
TTH’s second basis for protest was about the interview round, where they alleged that Sarah Norman, a Procedeo employee who is currently serving as PPS’s interim director of the Office of School Modernization under another contract, was present at the interviews. “While not an evaluator, it seems implausible that she did not have a hand in the development of [the RFP], even if only reviewing rough drafts or being privy to District conversations,” Chomiak wrote.
Chomiak added that one of the evaluators, an employee of OSM, could have been influenced because Norman oversees his work.
“To a third party, the impression is that while this evaluator was evaluating Procedeo’s work, Ms. Norman was evaluating his work,” he wrote. “TTH does not have any evidence of wrongdoing, so it cannot and is not suggesting that there was any wrongdoing. But this was an improper commingling of roles.”
Williams said Norman was only present as a proposer in the Procedeo interview, and that she was not present for any other interview. To the allegation that Norman may have looked at rough drafts, Williams wrote: “that statement and allegation is entirely unfounded.”
“It is disingenuous, at best, for TTH to assert that the process was somehow tainted when Procedeo had the one Procedeo Employee present for the Procedeo interview,” he wrote. “TTH admits in this protest that ‘it does not have evidence of any wrongdoing’ and that it ‘is not suggesting there was any wrongdoing.’ The reason for that is simple: there was no such wrongdoing.”
A spokesperson for TTH did not immediately respond to questions from WW about if the firm can seek additional recourse, or if it has plans to.
