City Council tosses Sinclair demolition bids; solid waste agency expected to cut Mount Trashmore fees in half for new round of bids

Contractors seeking a coveted, federally financed city contract to demolish the flood- and fire-damaged Sinclair meatpacking plant will have to start the bidding process over again, the City Council decided last night.

At the recommendation of its Procurement Committee, the council threw out the initial bids from 11 contractors after nearly all of them had raised questions about the city's bidding process for the multimillion contract while two contractors took the city to court.

Both of the contractors who went to court in separate proceedings, though, failed on Wednesday afternoon to convince judges to grant an injunction to stop the council from awarding a contract last night for the demolition if the council had chosen to do so.

The two contractors, Rachel Contracting of St. Michael, Minn., and Veit Specialty Contracting of Rogers, Minn., submitted the lowest two of the 11 demolition bids, but both did so by not following the city's bid requirements. Both proposed taking the Sinclair debris, which contains asbestos, to low-cost, out-of-state landfills even though the city's bid documents said the debris must go to Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency's Site 1 landfill - commonly called Mount Trashmore - just across the river from the Sinclair site.

The attorneys for the two contractors argued that Site 1 is an aged landfill, without a modern liner to help prevent leaching from the site. Cedar Rapids attorney Tim White, who is representing Rachel,  pointed Wednesday to a 2007 environmental assessment of the Sinclair site, which identified evidence of PCBs, arsenic, lead and petroleum products on the site in addition to asbestos.

The attorneys also said that the higher cost to use Site 1 - $4 million more than Rachel Contracting's $5.56 million bid using an out-of-state landfill - was unfair to taxpayers.

However, in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday afternoon, Assistant City Attorney Mo Sheronick successfully argued both that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources allows the Sinclair debris at Site 1 and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to pay for disposal there. It's not a contractor's role to decide either issue, and it's not a contractor's prerogative to ignore a Cedar Rapids city bid requirement, Sheronick told the judge.

Nonetheless, council member Chuck Swore, chairman of the council's new Procurement Committee, said the local solid waste agency has agreed in concept to charge $60 a ton at the landfill for Sinclair debris, or half of what it had intended to charge. The board of the solid waste agency is meeting today to approve the change in fee.

Swore said the new round of bidders will be required to take the debris to Site 1 as they were in the first round of bids. Bidders who don't want to shouldn't bid, he said.

Council member Tom Podzimek, who is a member of the solid waste agency board and who chaired it the last two years, suggested to Swore that the city consider using the agency's Site 2 landfill, at County Home Road and Highway 13, which is a modern landfill equipped with a liner.

Podzimek said putting the Sinclair material in Site 2 would save space in Site 1 for the debris from home demolition that is yet to come.

Swore, though, said Site 2 isn't available for the Sinclair material, which must be handled differently than regular solid waste. Earlier in the week, Karmin McShane, the agency's executive director, said Site 2 won't be available for such duty until the end of summer when the agency completes construction on an additional storage cell.

Council member Don Karr said the Sinclair debris is the city's responsibility and it belongs in a landfill here where the city can keep charge of it.

After last night's meeting, Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, thought the new bid opening on the Sinclair project was a couple weeks away.