It’s been more than a year since the bid market has been anything but brutal and May 14 wasn’t any different but there were at least some exciting results.

This morning ALCOSAN opened bids for its $25 million maintenance facility and received nine bids from general contractors, including all of the big guns in Pittsburgh. The low three were PJ Dick, Mascaro and Rycon, with PJ finishing low at $17.3 million.

Also on the 14th came the letters from Slippery Rock University announcing the successful contractors on its $27 million new Student Center. This project has been the center of much controversy over the past few months because SRU used a modified version of the state’s best value process to select contractors for general, mechanical and electrical trades, none of whom were the low proposer the first go-round. As a result of legal protests the project went out for another best-value round in March and the same general, Mascaro Construction was selected. With protests being filed again (and rejected) during the bid period this time it is not a forgone conclusion that the project will now proceed, but the results certainly capped off an interesting day at Mascaro.