Ventura Overpaid for River Cleanup, Contractor Says

The city of Ventura paid six times more than needed to clean up the Ventura River bottom this year when it awarded a $177,000 contract for the job, a local contractor said Tuesday.

Jack Saunders, a Fillmore contractor who bid $28,000 for the work, has filed a public-records request for copies of payroll and other documents related to the cleanup completed last week by California Land Clearing of Ventura.

“They only took two bids as far as I could find out, and the other one was $177,000--six times my bid,” Saunders said.

Meanwhile, City Manager Donna Landeros is combing through records submitted by California Land Clearing, looking at payroll statements, dump fees, recycling receipts and the overall tonnage removed from the riverbed.

The council approval of the cleanup, which came in a 6-1 vote last month with Councilman Jim Monahan opposed, left details of the agreement to Landeros.

Landeros said Tuesday that if she concludes that the $177,000 contract awarded to California Land Clearing was too high, she may ask company officials to “mitigate” the agreement.

The work “was faster and less volume than what we had originally estimated, so I was looking into it even before Mr. Saunders approached the council (Monday night),” Landeros said.

“There perhaps isn’t any legal recourse, but there might be recourse in terms of mitigation with the company,” she said. “They’re a responsible firm.”

In March, Monahan refused to approve the agreement because he thought the city engineer’s estimate of $189,000 was excessive.

“It was, at the best, mishandled by our city,” Monahan said Tuesday. “It should have gone through the public-works process like most of those contracts do.”

The contract was approved under an emergency ordinance that allowed city officials to avoid lengthy bid processes.

“My own estimate of the job, in talking to people who do that kind of work, is that it was a $50,000 job at best,” Monahan said. “Anyone would have been happy to do that job.”

Associate City Engineer Marquita Ellias, who prepared the $189,000 estimate for the job, said Tuesday that there was more work involved than Saunders or other contractors may realize.

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“It was 40 acres of cleanup,” she said. “Twenty-eight thousand dollars seemed extraordinarily low, and we felt we were protecting him by not awarding it to him.

“A few days into the work he would have realized what was involved,” she said.

California Land Clearing President Douglas J. Muelder said he had not yet figured out the cleanup cost to his firm.

“I’m not sure about the outcome of the contract without examining the paperwork,” he said.

As for the complaints of rival contractors, Muelder said: “There are contractors that are from time to time unhappy about what all contractors potentially make or lose on jobs.”

Mayor Tom Buford said he approved the deal based on the engineer’s estimate and the fact that the area is home to nesting shore birds, which helped prompt the emergency cleanup contract and limited the number of bidders.

But Buford said he welcomes the review.

“There’s a question there, and we’re going to take a look at it,” Buford said. “At this point, everybody has an interest in asking whether that was the right thing to do, and if it wasn’t, trying to prevent it from happening again.”

Saunders is not alone in complaining about the high cleanup cost. Other contractors also say the contract was let for much more money than the job was worth.

“They made well over $130,000 profit that the city taxpayers are going to have to absorb,” said Stan Wyatt, a partner in Port Machinery Co. of Ventura, which has done river-bottom cleanup work in the past.

“It was the biggest giveaway of tax money that I can recollect,” said Wyatt, who was not asked to bid on the recent job.

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Officials at Reed Land Clearing said they tried to bid on the cleanup project but were shut out because the public bidding process was bypassed under the emergency declaration.

“I went as far as I could to try and get into a position to bid for this work, but they never made it possible,” a Reed partner said. “I’m disappointed the city so easily misspent taxpayer dollars.”

Days after the Ventura River overflowed its banks, killing one man and forcing dramatic rescues of a dozen others, the City Council banned homeless people from returning to the area.

But remnants of the makeshift shanties and campsites were strewn throughout the riverbed by high waters, leaving behind tons of abandoned shopping carts, tarps and other man-made debris.

California Land Clearing also has secured contracts to clean up the city and state beaches, which were littered with driftwood and other debris after the storms.