Bids for canal locks start on July 8

The Panama Canal Authority will open bids on July 8 from three competing global engineering groups to build a third set of canal locks.

The Panama Canal Authority will open bids on July 8 from three competing global engineering groups to build a third set of canal locks.

The three bids, which have been locked in a bank vault since the consortia submitted them, contain the pricing proposals and technical design specifications on which the canal authority will award the contract, said Alberto Aleman Zubieta, administrator of the canal authority.

Opening the bids will begin a process of evaluation and negotiation that will eventually result in the award of the contract to the winning group.

Aleman said the proposals will be evaluated by a team of expert analysts who will select the eventual winner of the contract on criteria that are based 55 percent on technical merits and 45 percent on price. The analysts will also base their evaluation on a report by Deloitte and Touche, which has been auditing the bidding process.

He declined to estimate how long the process will take or when the contract will be awarded.

If the bid that is judged to have the ?best value? is priced above the canal authority"s target price for the contract, the authority will enter into negotiations with the bidder to see if it can match the target price ?without any changes in the RFP for the project,? Aleman said.

If the winning bidder declines to match the canal authority"s target price for building the locks, Aleman said the authority could reopen the bidding process. ?We won"t make any changes in the pricing,? he said.

The canal authority will not reveal its target price for the locks until it opens the bids on July 8 at 10 a.m. EDT, Aleman said.

Independent analysts have estimated the value of the contract at around $3.2 billion out of the total $5.25 billion cost that the authority has targeted for expanding the canal, but Aleman declined to confirm this estimate.

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