Landscaping bid review demand

We have put landscaping bids out for quotation. We received four. One of the contractors that did not get the job,who is also an association member,is demanding to see all bids and insurance information that was submitted. Are we obligated to supply this information? I am asking here before we seek advice from our attorney. Thank you

No.

As an aside, we've had a few discussions around here about the wisdom of hiring homeowners to do work for the association.

For:

* The person should be allowed to bid, same as any other professional.
* He may have added incentive to do good work for the community since he lives there.

Against:

* HOAs are sometimes viewed as the minor league because of their unwillingness to spend money and willingness to accept lower quality work as a result.
* Homeowner/contractors may have a sense of entitlement and expect not to be held to the same standards as on other jobs.
* It can be difficult for the board to manage somebody you see all the time if there are issues.

VickieV, is this a condominium whose declaration subjects the association to the Wisconsin condominium act? If so, this member has a legal right to see the bids. See Wisconsin Condo Statute section 703.20. https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/703 . Bidders have notice of this statute section. They know that when they bid, they need to be careful about including proprietary informaiton.

If this association is not subject to the Wisconsin Condo Act, then I agree with CathyA3 that bids often contain proprietary information, and the bidder assumes she or he can bid freely without fear of the proprietary information being disclosed. Hence for an association not subject to the Condo Act, so far I say you should not disclose the bids to owners or anyone else.

Since I enjoy hypotheticals...

If in fact a condo association must disclose bids to owners, how does the board deal with the reality that vendors will hesitate to bid at all if something like this can happens I assume this has happened in the past. Did boards refuse to accept bids from homeowners (which isn't a bad idea because of the potential conflict of interest, among other issues). Have there been any court cases that dealt with the conflict between state law and businesses' right to decide what information can be confidential? This is another one of those state laws that sound like good ideas until you think through the consequences.

Down the rabbit hole...

I went through something similar. Our original lawncare person was a member. Many people complained about him to me when I took over. Plus he felt that our HOA was an "open checkbook" to buy anything he wanted. That is how the previous Scumsucking President handled things.

What I had done is solicit bids when the contract came up to renew. Told him that he would have to submit a bid along with others. He wanted a "raise" so he built that into the bid. It was acceptable because it was on par with other lawncare bids. However, it gave us the opportunity to change lawncare providers. Which we did. He may have asked what the other bids were submitted for amounts. Which was open information and discussed at our open meeting. His bid was on par but decided change was good. He did try to "argue" with what he had to offer.

The biggest hiccup is that the Ex President had signed the lawncare contract in March instead of April. That meant after I dug through over 2 years of HOA records to find the original contract to confirm. This forced us to have to pay him 1 month we still owed him for March though he did not do anything. Plus we had to pay the new lawncare their first month. It cost us and additonal $2K we really did not have.

Will say that after that, our HOA kept the practice up of 3 bids per contract yearly. That way we were not stuck with "bad" lawncare if we had issues during that year. If they did good then we would have them bid again. Which they could then factor in their "raise" if need be. It wasn't built in they get X amount of a raise every year.

I would give him the SAME information you would give anyone else that is a member if they ask about lawncare bids. That is X amount for X terms. No need in bringing in the issues had with them.

Once bids are accepted, I can see allowing for a review of the bids as well as insurance information for each vendor. The matter of closed bidding is to give vendors a fair shot at pricing the job OR providing the best menu of services for the quoted price. Closed bids are not designed to protect the HOA from its members.

That said, the HOA board of directors has 100% discretion over which bids to accept and is under no obligation to accept the low bidder.

This homeowner/bidder will use the review of bids to attempt to circumvent the board's decision; that much is nearly certain. However, the insurance question as well as inquiries for the winner to prove theiy're carrying full worker's comp, liability protection, E-Verify, etc, is legitimate because those expenses separate true professional companies from jackleg bidders and thus will be reflected in higher bids.

This board of directors is nervous about disclosure and explaining the decision publicly.

In that case. I believe that the board should provide exactly the documents that are required by state statutes, but no more and with no further comment.

Any additional arguing or justifications the board may engage in would promote the false notion that homeowners are entitled to overturn board decisions (except in the few specific instances that may be allowed by state law).

This issue is an example of why some associations do not accept bids from homeowner/vendors. If this person is causing problems already, imagine what sort of entitled attitude he may bring to his work and the difficulties a board or community manager may have in overseeing that work. Unless the homeowner/vendor provides some unique or extraordinarily good product, the association will be able to get the same quality of work elsewhere and without the drama.

We've concentrated mostly on the fact that the person asking to view the bids is a member. But the issue I see here is that he's also a competitor who bid on this job and, I assume, was not awarded the contract.

Questions:

* Does an HOA have any obligation to disclose the fact that a competitor lives in the community (the board wouldn't necessarily know this), or are other vendors obligated to investigate or assume that such a thing is possible?

* Does the HOA incur any liability if they failed to disclose the presence of a competitor in the community, or if they provided copies of other bids to the competitor and the bids happened to include confidential information? Does the answer change if a vendor can somehow prove that they lost work as a result?

* Can a vendor reasonably redact enough information in order to protect their own interests and still provide enough information to the HOA requesting the bid? If no, what is the likely outcome? (Pretty obvious, I think.)

This is another of those thorny issues involving competing rights - ie, does the homeowner/vendor's right to view bids override businesses' rights to operate on a level playing field? Maybe...? If the OP consults the association attorney, I hope they post a general summary of what they were told.

Fortunately for my community, bids are confidential so these particular issues don't arise. Especially in states where homeowners are entitled to view all bids, I think that boards should think hard about accepting bids from homeowners. When you look at the potential downsides of hiring a homeowners - ie. conflicts of interest on the homeowner's part, the board's inability to treat the homeowner as just another vendor, unstated and unreasonable expectations on both sides, and the possibility that outside vendors will stop bidding on this HOA's jobs - I think it's pretty clear that doing so benefits the homeowner/vendor at the expense of the HOA.