As reported in the Ottawa Citizen, the City of Ottawa admitted on Friday that it allowed SNC-Lavalin’s bid to continue being considered during the contract competition for the Trillium Line expansion even though the company’s bid didn’t meet the minimum technical score threshold.

City manager Steve Kanellakos sent a detailed memo about the scoring to council. The memo was in response to questions filed last March by Coun. Diane Deans, who, along with a handful of other councillors, expressed concern about a lack of transparency in the Stage 2 procurement process.

Advertise YOUR business on Construction Links Network – Download the media kit

SNC, under the project name TransitNEXT, won the $663-million construction contract to build the Trillium Line expansion. The contract value is $1.6 billion when a long-term maintenance agreement for the Trillium Line is included.

The city has been under pressure to disclose more information about how it selected TransitNEXT to extend the Trillium Line to Riverside South and the Ottawa International Airport. There were two other shortlisted bidders, Trillium Link and Trillium Extension Alliance, which were both consortia of several companies.

Council approved the $4.6-billion Stage 2 O-Train expansion work on March 6. The federal and provincial governments are together contributing $2.4 billion for Stage 2 construction.

Another construction consortia called East-West Connectors, made up of the companies Kiewit and Vinci, won the contract for the $2.6-billion Confederation Line expansion project.

However, it was the city’s selection of TransitNEXT that has attracted the most attention, especially when it came to the technical scoring during the bid-review process. A CBC Ottawa report in March, citing unnamed sources, suggested TransitNEXT didn’t achieve the minimum technical scoring threshold of 70 per cent.

Keep reading in the Ottawa Citizen