"Todd Lee, the district's construction manager..." says that being forced to comply with (instead of skirting)) competitive bidding laws is the loss of "a valuable tool." Really? A tool to hand projects friends or campaign contributors? Someone should check to see how many contributors to the bond measure campaigns ended up getting construction or consulting contracts.

Business as usual. What else is new(s).

This lease-lease back practice sounds like a smoke and mirrors invite for fraud and nepotism-type connections. Cynical business as usual of we will cheat and steal until somebody stops us. Who verifies the quality of less expensive materials? is the first important question that comes to mind.

Something of this reeks of prostituted processes. My intuition is on alert.

Most good contractors already have all the work they can properly handle. The lesser quality ones will do exactly what the Mitchell Park Library contractor did: Grossly underbid, fight the City for every possible change order, stop work when they don't get their way, get fired or sued, costly the district both time and money.

Lease-leaseback agreements have been used around the State for years. If you read the story, the Fresno district did not use a lease, it used a construction contract and tried to call it a lease. Being lazy is a good way to get sued. Lease-leaseback still means competition among subcontractors and it also gives the district the contractor's expertise in the costs of fixtures and finishes. In an escalating market it is not feasible for an architect to accurately estimate how builders will bid or what building elements might provide the best value.

Avoiding potential litigation is generally smart, but people trying to paint the district as having done something wrong or illegal are missing the boat for the sake of controversy. This will cost us money, reducing either the quantity or the quality of construction across the entire bond program. For those who care, New Slater just got a little harder to execute.

The bigger picture is that there are rules which have been put into place because of a long and storied history of cronyism with your tax dollars. The intent of those rules is pretty clear, yet many if not most districts bend over backwards with convoluted legal maneuvers like this to get around the rules rather than follow them.

The right thing to do is to either demonstrate *why* and *how* the rules are wrong and to work to get better rules put into place, or to (shockingly) follow the rules.

What message does it send to our children when they see this sort of example? I guess cheat, weasel, lie and anything else you can get away with.

In no way does the lease-leaseback mechanism eliminate competitive bidding-- that is an absolutely ludicrous statement. I assume that MVWSD bid out the Crittenden and Graham jobs (did the author of this article take 5 minutes to look into that?)-- if they didn't, that is a whole different and unrelated problem. A lease-leaseback allows districts to pick among qualified builders as opposed to getting stuck with any hack that can cobble together a bid package, regardless of track record. @oldsteves Mitchell Park library example is a great one-- his whole comment is spot on.

Especially with a district as dysfunctional as MVWSD, it is absolutely tragic that their construction manager has lost this tool to best accomplish the goal of high quality facilities at the lowest cost.

Eric is spot on. Typically the district brings in for interviews and proposals,4 to 6 "Competant" contractors who have a track record of completing projects on time and have very few , if any, claims aginst owners from other previous projects.I would invite the media and public at large to investigate the success rate of these types of projects (budget,schedule and claims)against the typical low bid process. Maybe if they heard the horror stories of schools not being completed in time for school to open and way over budget to boot, they would change their tune. How about them investigating the impropriorties of what goes on with alot of those low bid projects ? False claims, prevailing wage skirting,covering up of defective work, ect. If any of that happened at their childs school, who would they blame ?? I wonder.