The Public Finance Authority board voted Friday to award a massive design and construction contract to rebuild four St. Croix public schools and an administrative center before voting to change course on a previously awarded overhaul of the island’s infrastructure.
The schools contract went to Suffolk-CBNA, whose total bid to design and rebuild the Alexander Henderson, Alfredo Andrews and Claudo O. Markoe elementary schools, as well as the Pearl B. Larsen PreK-8 School and the administrative center, came in at close to $790 million. Suffolk was also contracted earlier this year to design and build an administrative center on St. Thomas, as well as the Lockhart K-8 School, the Ivanna Eudora Kean High School, and the Yvonne Milliner Bowsky, Jane E. Tuitt, and Emanuel Benjamin Oliver elementary schools.
Adrienne Williams-Octalien, director of the V.I. Disaster Recovery Office, said ODR received three responses to a solicitation issued in March. The highest bid came in at more than $1 billion.
The board then voted to re-award an infrastructure bundle including power, water, wastewater and roadwork on north-central St. Croix after the previous awardee, Persons Services Corp., rescinded their proposal. The $682.8 million contract went to Kiewit, the runner-up from the earlier solicitation, which filed a bid protest over the PFA’s initial award to Persons.
According to a letter the construction firm wrote in April, their bid was $143 million below Persons’s, and the firm wrote that it had become “increasingly concerned” with the territory’s selection.
“These concerns include, but are not limited to, the bonding capacity of other proposers, VIODR not following or adhering to the RFP scoring and selection criteria, and awarding a contract that is not compliant with the requirements of the RFP,” the company wrote.
On Friday, Williams-Octalien said Persons pulled out because “they had to provide some documentation for bonding … once we entered a phase of contracting, they needed to provide all of those documentation.”
“We suspect that there may have been some difficulty in them getting what they needed to get, which resulted in their correspondence to us,” she said.
Gov. Albert Bryan Jr., who chairs the PFA board, said he assumed Kiewit had withdrawn their bid protest in light of ODR’s updated selection. Williams-Octalien said Kiewit had already agreed to let the solicitation process continue.
“And they said that they would continue without seeking further…,” she began.
“Redress,” Bryan finished.
“I think I like ‘redress,’” Williams-Octalien agreed. “But also — just, I want to note — with Persons, Persons also has a number of other projects in the territory, and their correspondence also said that they did not want to adversely affect any timelines and the pace of the recovery, and therefore they withdrew their proposal, so we respected their decision.”
Despite Kiewit’s initial protest — and a lawsuit one rejected bidder filed in September — Bryan declared Friday that the bid process works.
“You know, these are big contracts, so when people don’t win, they’re upset. But I think we have a good track record going now in terms of being able to establish that when we select a bidder, it’s through due diligence,” he said. “Sometimes, you know, you are selected, but the contracting process doesn’t work out. So we go to the next bidder.”
The board also approved an $80,000 allocation from the authority’s project fund to provide matching costs for two turf soccer fields in partnership with FIFA — with an additional $160,000 for lighting — and $100,000 from the fund to the Yvonne Ashley Galiber Breast Cancer Foundation, which will hold the 2026 Breast and Prostate Cancer Conference on St. Croix next year. During the latter half Friday’s meeting, the board received operational updates from the V.I. Next Generation Network and the West Indian Company. After a report from the latter, board members spoke favorably of attracting foreign cruise ships to boost tourism in the territory.
“And that means using our political clout — as little as it may be — to get, you know, customs agents and whoever else … to work on that,” said board member Dorothy Isaacs. “But with all the technology these days, it should not be that big of a problem.”
Bryan noted that the U.S. Homeland Security Department “is going through a massive expansion right now.”
“None of it good, I might say,” Isaacs interjected.
Bryan took a more glass-half-full view and predicted that the department’s hiring spree will curb the flow of drugs from the eastern Caribbean and South America.
“As a matter of fact, the president is making moves right now in the military to move warships into the Caribbean” to deter activity from drug cartels, he said. “And as part of that, there’re also going to be soldiers deployed throughout the Caribbean — American soldiers — which is good for the economy. The drugs come through, they get lost, they get confiscated, people start speaking — that’s how the death starts. So this is going to stop some of that violence in our area, hopefully.”
Prior to Friday’s board meeting, the PFA subsidiary responsible for managing $150 million in Grant Anticipation Revenue bonds convened to approve a slate of organizational moves.
The VITIC board approved contracts with the Walker Legal Group for legal services, Behnam and Hodge for accounting services and BDO USA for auditing services. The board also approved the corporation’s operating budget for the current and upcoming fiscal years and voted to adopt the Public Finance Authority’s financial and procurement policies.
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