Government & Politics  April 7, 2022

Integrity of Marshall Fire debris cleanup contract again questioned in lawsuit

BOULDER COUNTY — Less than two weeks after a Boulder County District Court judge tossed a lawsuit questioning the integrity of Boulder County’s bidding process for its Marshall Fire debris cleanup contract, another lawsuit has been filed in the same court with some of the same allegations. 

Ceres Environmental Services Inc., a Florida contractor that was not the winning bidder, is suing the county and the members of the Boulder County Commission, alleging that DRC Emergency Services LLC was awarded the contract after a bidding process shrouded in secrecy and misrepresentations. 

The lawsuit asks the court to overrule Boulder County’s decision to deny an appeal by Ceres and claims that a separate motion will be forthcoming that will demand the county pause its debris-removal process while the lawsuit is adjudicated. 

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“This lawsuit is without merit,” Boulder County attorney Ben Pearlman said in a prepared statement. “It’s heartbreaking that a large disaster management firm with no ties to Colorado is attempting to hold up our ability to make progress in Marshall Fire recovery efforts. We’ve learned throughout this process that in the highly competitive environment of private disaster management firms, like Ceres, are focused more on money than on the families affected by disasters.

The Ceres legal action in some ways echoes a lawsuit brought earlier this year by former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown and his group Demanding Integrity in Government Spending, which accused the county of violating open meetings laws during the bidding process. 

Judge Stephen Howard determined that Brown — who does not live in Boulder County and could not prove injury related to the award of the contract to DRC — had no standing to sue and dismissed the case in late March.

DRC, which is not a defendant in Ceres’ lawsuit, is an “unqualified contractor who has neither the experience, timeline, nor pricing to justify the award” of the bid, Ceres’ attorneys wrote in the complaint filed this week. 

“Although the law mandates an open and competitive bidding process, the process involved secret negotiations with DRC, unstated and nonpublic requirements that were shared with DRC to the exclusion of other bidders, improper modification of DRC’s proposal to skew its proposed timeline, and inflation of DRC’s scoring by understating DRC’s actual pricing and overstating DRC’s experience based on DRC’s misappropriation of the experience of other bidders, like Ceres” and other bidders, the lawsuit alleges. 

Ceres claims that DRC and fellow bidder ECC Constructors LLC were given an opportunity to interview with county officials and orally modify their bids to better perform on Boulder County’s 100-point scoring metric. 

The lawsuit said that “DRC not only misrepresented its own prior experience but falsely claimed experience from projects that Ceres and ECC successfully managed on significant fire cleanup contracts on the west coast.”

In recent bids on the West Coast, where officials are more familiar with the players involved with past fires, Ceres claims that DRC did not tout its fire-cleanup experience in California, assuming that decision-makers there would know which companies were actually responsible for local work.

If DRC’s bid had been submitted and evaluated more accurately, it would likely not have been the winner, Ceres argues.

Boulder County officials, in a statement Thursday, said Ceres was the third-ranked bidder. So even if DRC wasn’t awarded the contract, Ceres wouldn’t have necessarily won it, either.

The plaintiff “was not one of the two selected to be interviewed by the committee because of the large scoring gap between the Ceres proposal and the two firms selected to interview,” the county said.

The allegedly faulty bidding process not only impacted Ceres’ opportunity to win a multi-million dollar contract, but also jeopardizes Boulder County’s ability to receive reimbursement cash from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the complaint claims. 

The county counters that it “has consulted not only with its internal experts and state officials who possess expertise in Federal Emergency Management Agency grants, but also with the State’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and FEMA at all stages of the project and has received and incorporated recommendations to proceed at all times in accordance with FEMA requirements. The county also has already requested and received FEMA’s determination that the [debris-removal] project is eligible for FEMA reimbursement.”

Boulder County officials said Thursday that the plan to move forward with debris cleanup as planned unless ordered to halt by a judge. 

“The county will do everything in its power to stop Ceres from disrupting cleanup of the approximately 750 households that have chosen to participate in the [debris] program.”  

This article was first published by BizWest, an independent news organization, and is published under a license agreement. © 2022 BizWest Media LLC.

BOULDER COUNTY — Less than two weeks after a Boulder County District Court judge tossed a lawsuit questioning the integrity of Boulder County’s bidding process for its Marshall Fire debris cleanup contract, another lawsuit has been filed in the same court with some of the same allegations. 

Ceres Environmental Services Inc., a Florida contractor that was not the winning bidder, is suing the county and the members of the Boulder County Commission, alleging that DRC Emergency Services LLC was awarded the contract after a bidding process shrouded in secrecy and misrepresentations. 

The lawsuit asks the court to overrule Boulder County’s…

A Maryland native, Lucas has worked at news agencies from Wyoming to South Carolina before putting roots down in Colorado.
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