Santa Cruz Seeks More Info From Marina Bids

Mar 28, 2008

By Zoraida Diaz, GUANACASTE, Costa Rica (The Beach Times)

The municipality of Santa Cruz will tell the four remaining bidders for the concession of the Flamingo Marina in Northern Guanacaste they must present additional requirements before a decision can be made.

The Municipality wants to know how the winning bidder would move dirt, what routes it would take with heavy machinery, and what strategies they have for using local labor.

The fresh request for information, unanimously approved by the council, is likely to further complicate an already complicated process.

Bidders are to be given ten days to submit “plans as to the precedence of the materials to be used in the building of the marina, the routes to be taken when bringing in fill and the legality of the materials to be used in accordance to parameters of the code of mines, permits to use dynamite and others required in this process.”

The council’s committee to adjudicate the marina based the motion on a memorandum from the Comisión Interinstitucional de Marinas y Atracaderos Turísticos (CIMAT), the government department charged with overseeing all technical aspects of this and other marinas.
But that memo was meant to be a guide for the municipality.

The memo states that given the nature of the bidding process CIMAT has a “legal limitation” to give individual pronouncements on each bidding offer.

“For this reason we are providing a criteria from a general perspective, with technical parameters that will help the Municipality to be more objective when the time comes to evaluate the bids,” says the letter, signed by CIMAT’s Technical Secretary, Oscar Villalobos, and the Coordinator of the Technical Unit, Francisco Aragón.

The CIMAT letter reiterates the four bids filled the only requirement CIMAT was responsible for during the process — a signature and seal, which tells the municipality that all four offers met the services and infrastructure norms listed in the Law of Marinas.

The four remaining bidders are Desarrollo de Marina de Matapalo DEMM S.A., Willily OceanView S.A, Inversiones Rigilcom S.A., and Tamarindo Lifestyles S.A.

The four presented their offers to the municipality on January 14, this year, and although there have been objections presented to at least two of them, the municipality has not indicated that any are out of the running.

However, at least one bidder has asked the municipality to scrap the whole process and start again.
In a letter to the municipality, Inversiones Rigilcom S.A. says the process should be declared null and void because a municipal holiday interfered with the way the bids were received.

“According to Executive Decree No 34237 dated December 3, 2007, published in the Gaceta No. 12 of January 17, 2008, all public workers of the canton of Santa Cruz were given the day off on January 14, 2007, due to the civic celebrations of said canton, which was adopted by the municipality, as the installations of the municipality were closed, as well as all the administrative offices of the canton,” says the letter.

Source: http://www.thebeachtimes.com/