Navigating construction contracts between the Virgin Islands Office of Disaster Recovery and would-be vendors has become so complicated that the territory will hire a private law firm to dot every i and cross every t, officials said Friday morning.
The Public Finance Authority voted unanimously to spend $1,141,088 for a year of construction contract services from Memphis, Tennessee-based Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell, & Berkowitz, PC.
With an estimated $12 billion in anticipated hurricane and COVID relief funds to spend, the Office of Disaster Recovery’s requests for proposals from construction firms have been met with increasingly diverse and detailed contract presentations, said Gov. Albert Bryan Jr.
“As we move forward in the recovery we’ve realized we’re encountering more and more complex projects with more and more detailed RFP presentations. There’s a need for assessment of these proposals that are being sent to us,” Bryan said. “In the construction area, people don’t bid for projects the way we traditionally speak of.”
The territory was behind industry standards and considering upgrading how it seeks and manages its procurement process, Bryan said. The new way, he said, is for contractors, engineers, and construction firms to work more closely together, eliminating many costly change orders.
“We’ve never really done projects like that so we needed the additional support to make sure we’re doing it correctly and have that kind of legal contract that really addresses what we don’t know. We can address what we know but we’ve never been down this road before with this amount of projects,” the governor said.
It’s more than streamlining, said Disaster Recovery Director Adrienne L. Williams-Octalien. Without proper procedures in place, the USVI could be missing out on available funds.
“We need to ensure our procurement process meets the requirements for all the federal programs,” Williams-Octalien said. “We are now entering into a new phase of our work for the recovery projects we have going. And we are encountering different types of projects and we want to ensure we have firms within our reach that can assist the ODR and the agencies in addressing some of these complex construction issues that we anticipate that we will encounter.”
The law firm, founded in 1888, boasts more than 650 attorneys working in a dozen states and territories. Their contract with the Virgin Islands government has an option for a second year if needed. Their work in the Virgin Islands would be limited to the Disaster Recovery Office, although it wasn’t clear what contracts or the number of contracts the law firm would evaluate.
The Office of Disaster Recovery has allocated nearly $7.69 billion of the roughly $10 billion in federal funds to help 2017 storm recovery but only actually expended around $3.15 billion, leaving 109 priority projects in various stages of planning or work, according to its website. Listed alphabetically, they start with $5.25 million to rebuild a hurricane-damaged St. Croix administrative building and end with $1.3 million to repair the Whim Museum. The list includes medical centers, fire stations, libraries, schools, parks, jails, the utility grid, roadways and bridges, and housing developments, including the long-stalled Donoe rebuild, where a disagreement between the Virgin Islands Housing Authority and the project contractor has put the project dramatically behind schedule.
