The current inflationary economy apparently is beginning to affect Richland County government’s ability to purchase goods and services. County commissioners voted Tuesday to reject all bids that were submitted for the county engineer’s summer chip-and-seal road maintenance program and later received just one bid that was higher than the estimate to install an emergency generator at a sewage lift station in Madison Township.

The county received just two bids last week for more than 21 miles of chip-and-seal work -— $587,561 from Earthworm Construction of Iberia and $734,931 from the Shelly Company of Thornville. The estimate for the work was $523,950.

“By state law, we cannot award either one of those bids, being more than 10% over our estimate,” said County Engineer Adam Gove, who asked that they be rejected.

Gove said he believes the higher bids were caused by the rising prices of petroleum products.

“You have a lot of trucking involved in this type of work. The emulsion is also fuel based so there’s excess cost,” he said. “Every year we do plan on a percentage of increase on that type of work. This year it just came in a lot more than we had planned.”

Gove asked commissioners to re-advertise for bids after reducing the estimate to $522,610 by removing nearly one mile of work on a section of Free Road that had some chip-and-seal work done last year. Gove said it was not necessary to do the work again as part of the 4.5 to 5 miles of Free Road being done this year.

“We only have a certain amount of money to put towards the chip-and-seal project,” he added.

Commissioners also opened bids Tuesday for installation of an emergency generator at a sewage lift station near the intersection of Ohio 39 and South Stewart Road that serves about 300 rural customers. Wastewater Treatment Director Amanda Miller told the board in March that the station had the most overflow problems during power outages out of six large lift stations around the county that have no emergency generators.

Miller said her department has only two portable generators on hand for storm-related electrical outages and that it takes two employees to transport and set them up, which sometimes can make it difficult to service everything when there are outages at multiple locations. Commissioners allocated $70,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds for the project after she pointed out that using the federal dollars would free department capital improvement funds for other projects.

The lone bid opened on Tuesday was from Workman Industrial Services Incorporated of Kent with a base bid of $96,900. The county estimate was $70,000.

Miller told the board in her March presentation that $50,000 originally was budgeted for the generator, but the cost rose to $70,000 after the engineering work was done and supply side issues developed. She also said there would be a lead time of 54 weeks for the equipment to arrive. 

“Since we’re above estimate, we’ll have to take appropriate action and have discussions regarding this bid,” said Commissioner Cliff Mears.

In the only other action on Tuesday, commissioners approved the renewal of an agreement with the City of Shelby to administer the Community Housing Improvement program and accepted two parcels of land to expand the right-of-way for a bridge replacement project on Smiley Avenue in Shelby.