Vermilion Parish Police Jury re-elects Picard as president

The Vermilion Parish Police Jury re-elected Jason Picard as its president and Brent Landry as its vice president at Wednesday’s first regular meeting of 2023.
Both were the only nominees for the positions.
Picard said the standing committee assignments would largely stay the same as they were in 2022 with a couple of changes.
On the Coastal Protection and Restoration Committee, Picard appointed Chad Lege as the chair and Sandrus Stelly as the vice-chair.
He also appointed Dr. Paul Whittington to the rabies control board.
In other business, the police jury voted to adopt a reapportionment ordinance.
The police jury heard from Janice Fabre of Sellers & Associates, who was accompanied by Registrar of Voters Tina Broussard, about the district reapportionment ordinance.
“Tina and I had to redo the districts, because whenever you ran for police jury, the districts changed, and precincts have to follow police jury lines,” Fabre said. “So some of them were split, and she had to give them another name. After we did that we renamed everything to make it easy on her. She got permission from the Secretary of State to do that. So it’s all in the same ordinance.”
The police jurors also voted to re-bid Phase II of the 2022 Bridge Improvements Project after rejecting the low bidder’s bid as non-responsive.
Kim Touchet of Primeaux Touchet & Associates said the bid was in violation of state law because the bid documents did not include evidence of corporate authority to submit a bid.
The project is being paid for by state funds.
“In meeting with Paul (Moresi III, the police jury’s legal counsel), we determined that his bid was non-responsive and should be thrown out
“Under the public bid law, written evidence of the authority of the person signing for the public bid works shall be submitted at the time of bidding,” Moresi said.
In the absence of that written evidence, he said, the bid is considered non-responsive and the public body has no discretion to consider the bid. Moresi said if anyone from L&R Construction of Kaplan, which submitted the low bid, was at the meeting they could speak about the issue.
“Unless I’m missing something, then I really don’t think you have any choice but to declare that the bid of L&R is non-responsive to the bid invitation and so therefore it must be rejected as being non-responsive,” Moresi said.
Police juror Dane Hebert asked why Moresi thought the information was not included in the bid. Moresi said he thought it was probably just an oversight, because situations where bids are deemed non-responsive is a rare occurrence.
“It doesn’t happen very often, but the courts over the last 10 or 12 years have said, if you miss one of these basic blocks that have to be submitted, then the public body does not have any discretion,” he said. “It’s not a good situation because they were by far the lowest bid, but if the bid’s not responsive, it can’t be accepted.”
Hebert asked if it was possible to begin the bid process again once the low bid was rejected.
Two other bids from Reliant Industrial Solutions and Keiland Construction were significantly higher than the apparent low bid.
“You haven’t accepted any bids yet,” Moresi said. “The first step is to reject the apparent low bidder for being non-responsive. It appears that the second and third low bids were proper, so you could accept the second low bid. However, if that bid is above the amount that you budgeted or estimated, that would be one of the things under the public bid law that would give you the flexibility to reject the remaining bids and do the project over again, if you choose to do so.
“You have to have a reason to do so, but the fact that it’s above your estimate or budget is an acceptable reason to reject the remaining bids, if you choose to do so. That’s up to you.”
The police jury then voted to reject the low bid as non-responsive. Touchet said that he thought the police jury could either reject all bids because they are over budget, or foot the bill and pay the extra cost ($227,000) to build the three bridges in the project.
Touchet said he also considered removing one bridge from the project, but even with only two bridges, the next lowest bid was still over budget.
“We really need three of those bridges redone,” Touchet said. “Even if I subtract out one of the bridges, which was the least one that we felt could last a while longer, he’s still over budget. I’m going to have to go in and revise the plan and try to probably put bids in alternates to where we can pick and choose, and revise the plan to where we can try to get it back under budget in the next bid.”
Touchet answered another question from Hebert, saying he thinks there is time to rebid the project. The parish can use the state funds until July, and ask for an extension if it needs it beyond that point.
With that, the police jury voted to reject the remaining bids and rebid the project.