Court Opinion

ID: 9744024
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:52:19.000291+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:46.260680
License: Public Domain

Kass, J.
(concurring). One of the well worn cliches of judicial opinions is: “we are constrained.” It fits here. Adherence to precedent and judicial restraint, sound orthodoxies both, compel the conclusion we have reached. The cases line up persuasively that public bidding authorities have discretion to waive or to count as disqualifying minor defects in bid responses. Courts, in general, should not second-guess the honest exercise of discretion by bidding authorities for the excellent reason that a bidding authority, which has access to trained personnel (e.g., its architect), is in a better position to *107evaluate the significance of an apparently minor deviation than a judge is.
Nevertheless, in hope that it may provide guidance to bidding authorities about how they ought to exercise their discretion, I give voice to my concern that the city of Boston has acted with undue rigidity and perhaps without sufficient regard to the public interest — $703,200 worth of public interest (the difference between Peabody’s bid and Sciaba’s bid). If the minority contractor had never been certified as such, the deviation might have been regarded seriously as in some fashion undercutting the city’s minority hiring program. Here, the contractor in question, K & R, had been certified as a minority contractor by the responsible State agency, SOMWBA. What needed to be done by K & R with the city of Boston was, at most, administrative routine. The missing piece of paper was filed with the city within twenty-four hours of the bid opening. There is no whisper that K & R was not certifiable by the city as a minority contractor. The absence of a readily available bit of backup information has not been shown to have any bearing on the integrity of the bid, its economic value, the soundness of the building to be done, or the social objectives of the city. We appreciate the city’s concern that it had rejected (some months earlier) a low bid by Sciaba because of the same sort of bid defect; but it is questionable whether mere consistency — of which Emerson had harsh things to say 150 years ago — is a sound reason for so costly an exercise of judgment.