Bid on new fire station rescinded; sign ordinance "a lot of catch 22s"

The Picayune City Council rescinded the bid they had received for the construction of the new fire station to be built at the west end of Goodyear Blvd just off Beech Street.

The problem with the bid was the absence of a bid bond with the bid package received by the city. The bid was submitted online and the bid bond was not uploaded when the bid was submitted.

Councilman Larry Breland (pictured) asked City Attorney Nathan if the council would have any liability in taking this action?

“My understanding of the issue was the publication language in the bid package made reference to the wrong portion of the bid statue, which is just an oversight,” Farmer explained. “By virtue of doing this, we caught it early enough that if you had awarded it and spent any money on it (project), the argument could have been that appropriation and the expenditure was not authorized under state law.”

Farmer said that by rescinding the bid, the city will now go back through the bid process. Farmer explained that both the bid submitted, and the bid packet were unacceptable because both had items missing.

The council voted 4-1 to rescind the vote with Breland voting no.

At the end of the meeting, Councilman Wayne Gouguet ask for an update on the sign ordinance committee that was formed to review the current exhaustive language in place in the city sign ordinance.

Tom Milar, Code Enforcement Office, told the council that the committee was at a stand still due to the complicated language in the ordinance. Milar gave an example of how the sign ordinance language is hard to interpret, which thus make it hard to explain and even harder to enforce.

Milar said, “There’s a lot of catch 22s in here.”

Milar suggested the city hire an outside firm to review and possibly create the new sign ordinance, which would require a budget amendment to hire an outside firm. The city was in hopes of an ordinance that would be approximately four to six pages long.

The council did not take any action on Milar’s suggestion.