CBCA 6891

DENIED: January 10, 2024 CBCA 6891 DANIELS BUILDING COMPANY, Appellant, v. DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS, Respondent. Bret S. Wacker of Clark Hill PLC, Detroit, MI; and Jonathan Christopher White and Brian Lick of Clark Hill PLC, Lansing, MI, counsel for Appellant. Neil S. Deol, Office of General Counsel, Department of Veterans Affairs, Decatur, GA, counsel for Respondent. Before Board Judges RUSSELL, GOODMAN, and SHERIDAN. RUSSELL, Board Judge. Appellant, Daniels Building Company (DBC), seeks reformation of its contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in the amount of $369,990, plus interest. DBC claims that its bid for construction work at a VA facility contained a mistake of which the VA’s contracting officer (CO) knew or should have known prior to contract award and that therefore its bid was not appropriately verified prior to contract award. The VA argues that, because there was no apparent mistake in DBC’s bid, DBC is not entitled to its requested relief. For the reasons stated below, we deny the appeal. CBCA 6891 2 Background I. The Procurement A. The Invitation for Bids On August 14, 2015, the VA issued an invitation for bids to expand its ambulatory care clinic’s exam room at the Ann Arbor VA Medical Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Appeal File, Exhibit 1 at 1.1 The solicitation required bidders to submit a base bid for all work, which was to be completed in 444 calendar days. In addition, they were required to submit ten deductive alternate bids (identified as Bid Items No. II through XI), with decreasing scopes of work and time frames for their completion. Id. at 3-5. For example, “Bid Item No. II, Deductive Alternate No. 1” asked bidders for lump sum pricing to complete all work in the base bid but to “[r]emove landscaping from the project scope”; “Bid Item No. III, Deductive Alternate No. 2” asked bidders to provide lump sum pricing to perform work identified in “Bid Item No. II, Alternate No. 1” (which removed landscaping work from the project) and, additionally, to remove the “outdoor event center terrace from the project scope”; “Bid Item No. IV, Deductive Alternate No. 3” asked bidders to provide lump sum pricing to perform work in Bid Item No. III, Deductive Alternate No. 2 (in which landscaping and the outdoor event center terrace were removed from the project) and, additionally, to remove certain offices from the project; and so forth. As such, “Bid Item No. II, Deductive Alternate No. 1” would remove the least amount of work from the base project, while “Bid Item No. XI, Deductive Alternate No. 10” would remove the most. The bid at issue here, Bid Item No. IX, Deductive Alternate No. 8, removed the work in the phlebotomy area from the project scope. Id. at 5. Only one other company submitted a bid for the project in addition to appellant. B. The Bids When preparing its bid, DBC received price proposals from potential subcontractors and tracked the subcontractor prices on an internal bid summary sheet. The subcontractor proposal at issue here reflected a reduction of $41,110 for the subcontractor work removed by Deductive Alternate No. 8. Exhibit 179, Deposition of Theodore H. Smith (May 19, 2022) at 26-29. However, when DBC entered this quote on its bid summary sheet, it added an additional zero to the amount – i.e., instead of entering $41,110, DBC entered $411,100. Id. at 26-31; Exhibit 18, Bid Summary Sheet. Thus, instead of reducing its bid, based on the subcontractor’s price proposal, by the smaller amount of $41,110 for Deductive Alternate 1 All exhibits referenced in this decision are found in the appeal file, unless otherwise noted. CBCA 6891 3 No. 8, which was DBC’s intent, its internal bid summary sheet included the $411,100 number. Exhibit 18. Specifically, for its bid for Deductive Alternate No. 8, DBC started with $8,631,000, the value for Deductive Alternate No. 7, and from this amount it deducted the value of the work being removed for Deductive Alternate No. 8 ($599,000, inclusive of the $411,100 amount) to arrive at a bid of $8,032,000. However, if DBC had used the $41,110 amount, its bid for Deductive Alternate No. 8 would have been $8,401,990 ($8,631,000 minus $229,010, the value of the work removed, inclusive of the $41,110 amount). The difference between the numbers as subsequently bid on Deductive Alternate No.