By Dominique Tassell
Southern Downs Regional Council passed a motion in the 28 July meeting to enter into a contract with Newlands Civil Construction to work on Stanthorpe Fitness Centre.
The contract is for the sum of $345,848.24 ex GST.
The Stanthorpe Fitness Centre is a Council owned facility in Stanthorpe providing fitness facilities for the community.
The current fire hydrant at the fitness centre is unable to provide Queensland Fire and Emergency Services’ required flow and pressure.
Currenty, the Stanthorpe Fitness Centre and Swimming Pool buildings has insufficient firefighting ability and is non-compliant.
To resolve the noncompliance, Council identified the necessary works to provide adequate fire flow to the Stanthorpe Fitness Centre and released a tender for the work.
The tender was for supply and installation of two water storage tanks, a booster pump system and associated pipework.
The tender was released in June 2021.
Council received three tender submissions for this contract from MWF Plumbing, Offaly Civil Engineering, and Newlands Civil Construction.
MWF Plumbing submitted a blank tender and therefore were considered a non-conforming submission.
The other two tenders were assessed further as compliant tenders, with Offaly Civil Construction submitted a price of $418,527.96 and Newlands Civil Construction submitting a price of $345,848.24.
A tender evaluation panel was formed to assess the tender submissions, and price was given half the weighting in the final decision.
Council has stated that both offers submitted by Newlands Civil Construction and Offlay Civil Engineering met all the requirements of the scope.
They also stated that both tenders demonstrated that the scope was well understood, and both companies received almost equal rating for the non-priced criteria.
While the evaluation process included the consideration of various criteria, at the end of the process both tenders met all the requirements and the decision was ultimately made based on price.
Newlands’s offer was priced lower than the offer submitted by Offaly Civil Engineering.
The price of $345,848.24 falls under the budget of $371,238.00 that SDRC had set aside.
In the Council meeting on 28 July, SDRC Councillor Stephen Tancred questioned why the budget was so specific as usually budgets have a round number. He said, however, it was pleasing that the final price was so under budget.
A staff member said a consultant had created the number for the budget.
Councillor Tancred noted that a local contractor has a non-conforming tender.
“Which is disappointing because we like to see locals do the work.
“I’m just wondering if we can reach out to that business for future tenders and assist them to submit conforming tenders.
“I’m not suggesting that we wind the clock back on this one, but for future work I’d love to see that business putting in a complying tender.“
SDRC Councillor Ross Bartley asked how often Council audited the hydrants for fire-fighting capacity generally within the region.
A staff member said fire hydrants are designed to have certain flow and pressure provided to them.
“So we do check that as part of our fire hydrant maintenance program and generally for critical hydrants we get a notice from QFES around, I guess, checking several key hydrants.“
