LePage puts brakes on bus contract
LIMESTONE, Maine — A contract executed by the Maine Military Authority was halted by Gov. Paul LePage Friday after he announced that it had been underbid, a move that he said resulted in unexpected costs to taxpayers while also threatening jobs at the Aroostook County facility.
Susan Faloon, special projects coordinator for the public information office of the Maine Emergency Management Agency, said that the full details of the matter, including how much the contract was underbid, were not yet known.
LePage said Friday that the problems dealing with the $19 million contract with the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority to refurbish 32 articulated transit buses had only recently come to his attention and he expected to give more details “in the coming weeks.”
Faloon said that employees at the Limestone facility were approximately one third of the way through completion of refurbishing the buses as required under the terms of the contract and it has become apparent that “it was not possible to make it profitable.”
“It was then determined that they really had to take a step back,” she said. “The costs were not being driven up by any one thing, but they had been working toward reducing costs throughout this entire process and still, it just was not working out.”
While the MBTA contract has helped keep about 50 workers on the job at the Limestone facility, Brig. Gen. Douglas Farnham, the LePage administration’s top military official, said the buses are costing more to finish than the contract pays.
“There was an expectation that the deficit or negative cash that would go along with each bus would shrink and would shrink rapidly, and you’d start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I don’t think that’s happened as quickly as anybody hoped that it would,” he said. “And so you get to a certain point and you say, ‘We need to take a timeout and make sure we look at this and act appropriately.’“
The Limestone workers are experienced in refurbishing military Humvees and, more recently, school buses. But the complexity of the articulated transit buses has been a challenge, according to Farnham, with more work than expected and unanticipated costs for parts and other expenses.
Farnham says he is still trying to get a detailed understanding of those costs.
A copy of the contract provided by the MBTA to a Maine Public Broadcasting Network reporter shows that there can be strong penalties in the event of failure to meet its terms, and it does not appear to allow for a unilateral work suspension by Maine officials. But it also includes language indicating that Massachusetts officials could allow a delay and financial adjustments if they determine that there has been “an increase or decrease in the actual cost of performance of the contract.”
Farnham says it’s in both parties’ interest to make sure the project does not come “crashing down.”
“Nobody wants to go there,” he says. “So what we are looking for is how do we go from where we are now to we get to a place where MBTA is happy, the facility at Loring continues to do the quality work that they’ve been known for almost two decades for, and we all come out in the right place.”
A spokesman for the MBTA says that so far, it has paid $6.7 million to the Maine Military Authority for bus rehab. Farnham says determining just how much of a loss the Maine taxpayers have already taken is one of the things he’s still trying to figure out.
Editor’s note: Maine Public Broadcasting Network reporter Fred Bever contributed to this article through a media partnership with MPBN.
