City Hall adopts new drug-testing and other rules for contractors bidding on city projects

CEDAR RAPIDS - All employees of contractors and subcontractors working at the sites of larger city building projects will be required to submit to pre-project drug testing as well as random drug testing while the construction is under way.

New city project bidding specifications, which were approved unanimously by the City Council this week, also will require employees on larger city construction projects to submit to a post-incident drug testing if an employee's performance could have contributed to an on-site incident causing property damage or personal injury.

In addition, contractors and subcontractors also need to show that they comply with a U.S. Department of Labor-approved apprenticeship program for employees working in the trades, that they hold weekly safety meetings with their employees and that they require employees to complete a 10-hour safety program approved by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Furthermore, contractors, electrical, mechanical and plumbing subcontractors and a project's design team all must attend a pre-bid meeting if they want to bid on a project. It won't be good enough to simply review bid documents and submit a bid under the new rules, called the City of Cedar Rapids Public Improvement Project Safety and Health Management Plan.

Council member Chuck Swore, chairman of the council's Procurement Committee and a retired general manager for electrical contractor Acme Electric, said the new rules are intended to improve the quality of construction on city projects and to “level the playing field” so contractors who pay for safety and apprentice programs and drug-testing are not put at a disadvantage when a bid on projects goes to the lowest bidder.

“We need to make sure that the contractors we're hiring live up to certain standards,” Swore said Wednesday. “There's nothing out of line here. It's just good business-practice standards for all contractors.”

Swore said the new contractor qualifications will allow the city to forego project-by-project, pre-bid qualifications and project labor agreements. Contractors will know upfront what they are getting into, he said.

The new contractor qualifications, Swore added, don't favor union or non-union contractors, and he added that representatives from both groups participated in helping the city draft the new bidding specifications.

Bud Maynard, project manager for non-union Garling Construction Inc. in Cedar Rapids and Belle Plaine, said most of what is in the new city bidding standards is business as usual for “upstanding, reputable” firms like Garling.

Mike Glavan, vice president and controller for union Kleiman Construction Inc., said the new standards were not a way to favor union over non-union firms, but a way to ensure “a baseline of professionalism” from the contractors bidding and working on city projects.

“This will protect against the out-of-town, fly-by-night guy” who passes himself off as an experienced contractor, Glavan said.

Glavan particularly thought the city would benefit from mandatory pre-bid meetings, which will require all bidders to come to a meeting to learn about the details of the project they are bidding on. It will cut down on contractors lowballing a bid expecting to make money back with project change orders, he said.

Glavan credited Swore with backing off one initial idea that would have required a long list of subcontractors -- painters, carpet layers and landscape firms, for instance -- to attend the pre-bid meetings. Such a crowd would have forced the city to rent out an auditorium, Glavan said.

Both Maynard and Glavan questioned the same thing about the proposed drug-testing policy - the requirement that every employee on the project be tested within 90 days of starting the job. That will mean that most employees will need to be tested at the start of every job, which both Maynard and Glavan said will add to the cost of the job.

“The only people who are going to make money on that are the medical professionals,” Maynard said.

Glavan said local unions are looking at a random testing program that would test 10 percent of the employees every month through the year, which he said would work for the city.

Council member Tom Podzimek, who runs a small contracting firm and a small insulation company, said the new rules will work to make the cost of employees more similar among companies bidding on city projects. As a result, the best managed companies will win bids on city projects since all bidders will face more-similar costs for employees working on a project, Podzimek said.

Swore noted that the new rules would not apply to smaller city remodeling projects, but only to new construction and to larger projects in which state bidding regulations are applicable.

In March, Mayor Ron Corbett announced that the city would require contractors on large, upcoming city projects to follow federal Davis-Bacon Act standards, which require that the local prevailing wage be paid to workers. Prevailing wage is typically union-wage rates. Many of those projects require such standards because of federal funding.