County rejects low bidder and pays additional $860,000 for artificial fields

ATLANTA - Are they paying too much?  That’s the question some are asking members of the Douglas County Board of Education.

The Douglas County school system recently installed four new artificial turf football fields. The county picked a local Cobb county company based on written proposals.

But, the FOX 5 I-Team examined all the proposals and found the county missed a chance to save taxpayers $860,000 dollars when it ignored the low bidder.

The winning proposal was submitted by Deluxe Athletics, who promised to install a FieldTurf artificial field.

“We provided the most comprehensible proposal, says Deluxe president Chris Daniluk, “we have done this before and done it with success”

At an April school board meeting, Superintendent Gorden Pritz told board members Deluxe Athletics’ proposal was not the low bidder and would cost taxpayers $4,512,000. But, he didn't tell the board or taxpayers that the low bidder, Sprinturf, said it could save the county $860,000.

“Our initial reaction was they made a mistake,” says Sprinturf’s Rom Reddy. He is CEO of the nationwide company Sprinturf, which has a plant in Georgia.

“They are going to pay a million dollars more and they are going to take it away from the kids,” says Reddy. “That is the tragedy here and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

In fact, Douglas county school board officials are proud of their decision.

Dr. Tim Scott, assistant superintendent over construction for Douglas county schools, told us Deluxe simply had the best proposal.

And, he claims Sprinturf's proposal left out critical information on how the company would build a storm water drainage system.

We examined the proposal and found the storm water system was actually designed by the county and a copy of it is in all the proposals. Sprinturf signed a proposal sheet agreeing to build the system just as designed. They also put up a bond to back up their work. And, the score sheets didn’t seem to indicate a problem. The evaluators gave Sprinturf the second highest score.

So, how close were the two proposals?

We examined the bid score sheets.  Four school district employees compared proposals from four companies and scored them in seven different subjective categories from experience, project team, to references.

We found all four evaluators gave Deluxe Athletics the exact same score on each and every one of the seven categories.

“The odds of winning the Powerball are better,” says Reddy.  

Dr. Scott said the consistent scoring didn’t strike him as odd.

Local Douglas County watchdog Roy Sparks says he had already been investigating the contract, when we showed him the score sheet. 

“So four people think identically alike, says Sparks, “that’s disturbing.”

FieldTurf, whose headquarters are in Canada but has plants in Georgia, wrote us to say Douglas County picked them because they had the best plan, their price was in the middle of the pack, and they had shown a commitment to the county through prior projects. 

Later this week, we'll examine that prior project. An artificial turf, that the county tells us has failed - and needs to be replaced.