Rio Grande City is going back to the drawing board in its search for an engineer for their wastewater treatment plant project.
The city commissioners, during a city meeting held Wednesday, unanimously voted to re-advertise a Request for Qualifications for a project to expand Rio Grande City’s wastewater treatment plant.
The project has been at a standstill since September when the city commissioners were unable to decide on an engineer for the project from the two firms that submitted qualification statements — Rio Delta Engineering and ARKiiForm LLC.
From those two firms, Rio Delta was ranked as the top bidder during the process of evaluating the two contractors but the majority of the commissioners objected to hiring the company, leaving the city with no contractor for the multimillion-dollar project to rehabilitate and expand their sanitary sewer collection system.
The Monitor requested copies of those qualification statements under the Texas Public Information Act but the city requested an opinion from the Texas Attorney General’s office on whether those documents could be exempted from public disclosure.
During Wednesday’s meeting, the commissioners voted to reject the qualification statements from those two companies before voting to re-advertise for the project.
“Hopefully we’ll have more than two firms at this time, or this time around, and that way we can look at all the qualifications,” said Mayor Joel Villarreal during the meeting.
The commissioners also created a scoring committee that would be responsible for reviewing to review all qualifications and proposals submitted to the city.
The committee will include the entire city commission, Castillo, Development Services Director Elisa Beas, and Finance Director Leonel Cantu.
