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The Ohio School Facilities Commission (OSFC) recently passed a resolution that makes it easier for participating school districts to establish additional qualification standards used to evaluate the responsibility of a bidder.

As a way to evaluate whether a bidder is responsible, school districts can now require bidders to certify the following:

• The bidder will employ supervisory personnel on the project that have three or more years in the specific trade and/or maintain the appropriate state license if any.
• The bidder has not been penalized or debarred from any public contracts for falsified certified payroll records or any other violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act in the last five years.
• The bidder has not been debarred from public contracts or found by the state (after all appeals) to have violated prevailing wage laws more than three times in a two-year period in the last ten years.
• The bidder does not have an Experience Modification Rating of greater than 1.5 (a penalty rated employer) with respect to the Bureau of Workers Compensation risk assessment rating.
• The bidder will provide a minimum health care medical plan for those employees working on this project.
• The bidder will contribute to an employee pension or retirement program for those employees working on this project.
• The bidder will only use skilled trade personnel with three years experience who were trained in a state or federally approved apprenticeship program, or workers who are currently enrolled in a state or federally approved apprenticeship program. Skilled trade is defined as those individuals in mechanical, electrical, plumbing, carpentry and fire suppression trades. The labor classification is excluded, as there is no current apprenticeship program for this classification.

It is important to note that the criteria above, along with any others used to evaluate a bidder, must be disclosed up-front during the bid process. Hidden or after-the-fact criteria are not permitted when evaluating the responsibility of a bidder.

School districts can elect not to implement any additional criteria on bidders beyond what has been used on past OSFC projects. However, this resolution allows school districts more flexibility to address concerns they, their constituents and certain interest groups may have regarding the school district's building program.

While it remains unclear if the additional criteria are labor neutral and can withstand a legal challenge, contractors bidding OSFC work now need to evaluate each project's bidding requirements on a district by district basis.