The company that earlier this month won the contract to manage the state’s $1.6 billion flood recovery program—only to lose the contract late last week, when the state decided to scrap the procurement process and start over—is taking the matter to court.
IEM, which beat out four other teams of bidders with its $250 million proposal to manage the Restore Louisiana program, filed for a declaratory judgment this afternoon, asking the 19th Judicial District Court to weigh in on an issue about licensure requirements that ultimately led the state to scrap the procurement process and seek new proposals.
“We filed a request for a judge to tell us what the law is,” says Joe Bruno, an attorney for IEM. “What you have is nothing more than an opinion by a lawyer for a board that was adopted by a board made up of non-lawyers, which has no legal authority whatsoever.”
Bruno is referring to a legal opinion issued March 16 by Larry Bankston, a lawyer for the State Licensing Board for Contractors, who opined that bidders had to hold a state residential contractor’s license at the time they submitted their proposals. His opinion came at the request of the second-place team in the bidding process, a company called PDRM and led by local firm CSRS, that was challenging IEM’s award.
The state cited Bankston’s decision the following day as the basis for scrapping the procurement process.
Bruno says his client was the lowest bidder and scored the highest in the RFP process, and that the state did not follow procurement laws in handling the situation.
A spokesman for the state Division of Administration did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
It’s unclear how much the legal action might delay putting a program manager in place and getting the flood recovery program up and running.
“We’ll go as quickly as we can,” Bruno says. “But this didn’t have to be. This was irresponsible.”
—Stephanie Riegel
