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Ousted Princeton school bus provider says bid improperly rejected

By Katie Wagner, Staff Writer
   For the first time in some 20 years, the school buses that carry students back to class in the Princeton Regional School District this week won’t be operated by Conover Transportation of Montgomery. The change, to Rick Bus Co. of Trenton, results from a bidding process that is being disputed by Conover.
   At the heart of the dispute is Conover’s submission of an apparent low bid that was rejected by the district because it was priced on a per-year basis, rather than the per-day basis called for in the bid specifications. Company owner Kenneth Conover Jr., who said he has sent a complaint letter to the state Attorney General’s Office, argued that the district could easily have asked him to correct the error rather than forego the low bid.
   When queried by The Packet about Mr. Conover’s claim, district officials said that state bidding laws prevented them seeking correction or clarification of his bid once it had been submitted.
   Alan Hegedus, Princeton’s school board president, said that if the district had asked Mr. Conover to convert his per diem bid to an annual one, the district would have been subject to litigation from the other bidders.
   However, spokespersons for the state Department of Education and the New Jersey School Boards Association said that there is no such prohibition in state statutes. The handling of a similar situation in The South Brunswick School District conforms to their view.
   In the South Brunswick case, a bus company submitted bids priced per day instead of per year, as requested in the school district’s bid specifications. District officials said they simply converted the numbers from daily to annual and confirmed the resulting number with the bidder.
   The Conover family has provided school bus service to Princeton for over 45 years. Mr. Conover, the successful bidder on the previous publicly bid contract, acknowledged that he triggered the bidding process now in dispute by declining to simply renew his contract for the coming school year because the district was offering what he said was an inadequate adjustment for diesel fuel price increases.
   During its May 20 meeting, the Princeton school board decided to award the busing contract to Rick Bus Co. of Trenton, which had submitted a bid priced at $118.50 per day, per route. Mr. Conover had submitted a bid that was priced at $21,250 per year for each of these routes, which he said would work out to $118.06 per day, had he been asked by the school district to make the conversion from annual to daily.
   A May 2 letter to bidders from the school board’s purchasing agent stated: “Conover’s Transportation, LLC’s was the lowest bid for the indicated routes, however, the bid was determined to be defective for not providing a price on a per diem basis as per the bid specifications. Therefore the bid was rejected for non compliance.”
       The letter described Rick Bus Co. “as the lowest responsible bidder.”
   School board member Joshua Leinsdorf, who argued against accepting the Rick bids at the May 20 meeting, said during a phone interview that he didn’t think accepting Rick’s bids instead of Conover’s bids had been a wise move, because of Conover’s long history providing busing to the district.
   ”I don’t think you do this to people who for 30 or 40 years have provided satisfactory service,” Mr. Leinsdorf said. “They’re (the school board administrators and members) using an administrative technicality.”
   Mr. Conover, who said he has conducted business with the school district for the last 20 years, said his bid was not defective because the bid specifications stated that each route would run for 180 days.
   The bid sheet states that all routes are to be bid on a per diem basis. The bid specifications state that the annual amount of per diem contracts shall be calculated by multiplying the total per diem cost by 180 days.
   ”The way I interpreted that bid sheet was if you bid on the route, you gave a per year bid,” Mr. Conover said. “We bid the routes out there in 2001 that way.”
   He added, “My bid was crystal clear. The specifications called for 180 days.”
   In a May 19 letter to the school board, Jeffrey Blumstein, an attorney representing Conover, wrote: “No consideration was given to either waiving the alleged bid defect in the public interest, or, as is the Board’s legal option, rejecting the bids for these routes and ordering a new bid, as allowed under N.J.A.C. 6A:27-9.8(b).”
   Stephanie Kennedy, the school board’s business administrator, said that the district did not seek clarification on the Conover bid because its attorney said that it would be illegal to do so.
   But Richard Vespucci, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, and Mike Yaple, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association, said state statutes do not forbid an entity, such as a school board, from asking bidders for clarification.
   ”Of course, no one keeps track of how often it occurs, but it’s not uncommon for a school district to ask for clarification on a bid,” Mr. Yaple said. “Certainly, it’s easier to do it up-front than later on and if it prevents the school from getting involved in a legal challenge it’s a benefit to the taxpayers, so asking for clarification can be a good thing. Of course you would not want to do anything that would give some bidders an unfair advantage, but certainly asking for clarification, or if you need to waive certain documents until the bidder can provide them, the board does have the ability to do that.”
   Mr. Yaple’s comments appear to be supported by the South Brunswick School District’s handling of a bid submitted by George Dapper Inc. for five bus routes this year. Joan Bonk, the district’s assistant business administrator, said that the district multiplied the per-day bids submitted by Dapper by 180 and added the results to arrive at the company’s per-year bid. After confirming the computations with the company, the district determined that Dapper was the low bidder for the five routes.
   Ms. Bonk added that South Brunswick’s bid sheets did require bidders to provide total annualized figures for all routes and that the school board also compared its calculations to the total annualized figures Dapper provided in another section of the bidding documents.
   Mr. Conover claims that the Princeton school board’s failure to handle his bid in the manner employed by South Brunswick raises legal questions, prompting him to take the matter to the state’s attorney general. He said he is not planning to file civil litigation, however, because of the costs involved.
   ”My feeling is why does a taxpayer of Princeton have to pay more for these routes when a perfectly good bid that should not have been thrown out was there,” Mr. Conover said. “They’re (the school board) going to be paying over $1,600 a year more than I was asking for and they’re supposed to be taking the lowest bid.” Mr. Blumstein, the attorney representing Mr. Conover at the time, urged the board to reconsider its May 20 decision to reject his bid. He wrote that the per-year rather than per-day nature of Mr. Conover’s bid should have been viewed as a clerical error.
   ”… In the context of this bid, and this contract, it is extremely simple to calculate that Conover’s per diem per route was $118.06, which was lower than Rick’s $118.50 rate,” Mr. Blumstein said in his May 19 letter to the school board. “The 2008-2009 school year is based upon 180 school days. … The bid specifications, which accompanied the Request for Proposal, made it absolutely clear that any per diem rate bid would have to be multiplied times 180 for several purposes,” the letter states.
   However, David Carroll, the school district’s legal counsel, advised the board during the May 20 meeting to accept the Rick bid. Mr. Carroll said that Mr. Conover’s submission of a per-year bid was a material error.
   Mr. Carroll has not returned phone calls from The Packet seeking further comment on the matter.
   Mr. Hegedus, the Princeton school board president, said: “If you’re a supplier, you have to have your bids right. … The only time we really have any latitude is when all the bids come out over the budget price,” Mr. Hegedus said.
   The board president added that even if the school district tried to extrapolate and make Conover’s bids conform, accepting the company’s bids would have been illegal.
   ”There’s not a simple way to do that,” Mr. Hegedus said.
   He added that to divide the sum Conover provided by 180 — the minimum amount of days a New Jersey public school must be open a school year — would be “discretionary,” because of snow days and other occurrences during the school year.
   ”The fundamental point is you have a nonconforming bid in front of you and you don’t tamper with that,” Mr. Hegedus said. “Favoring that bid to the detriment of other bidders who did conform, even though they might have potential to be the lowest bidder … the next week you’re in court, because the guy who came in second place says your process was flawed. It’s not uncommon for a losing bidder to say things to us that would call upon us to be outside of a legal process,” he added.
   Mr. Conover, however, said he believed the district’s decision was taken in “revenge” for his refusal to renew the prior contract with the diesel fuel adjustment it had offered him. “They were mandating a 2.8-percent increase in pay and with the diesel fuel prices it wasn’t enough,” he said. “They found a way to throw my bid out … because of this diesel fuel problem.”
   Mr. Leinsdorf said that he heard that members of the school administration, including Ms. Kennedy, were unhappy with the service Conover provided to the district in past years.
   Asked about this, Ms. Kennedy said, “The school district’s unhappy with every bus company” but said that the quality of Conover’s service did not influence the school board’s decision to award the contract to Rick.