Contracting Tips and Traps – Fall 2025
By Carrie Connelly
At the beginning of 2025, I provided some public contracting guidance to take into account as budgets were being developed and your building seasons planned. The following public contracting tips can help as you spend those budgeted funds on those planned projects and purchases.
- I want to touch on the growing buzz around alternative contracting methods (i.e. Design/Build and Construction Manager General Contractor (CMGC)) to help you determine whether one is truly best for your entity. These methods are complicated, not readily available, and require sophisticated team members who are prepared to work together from project design through its completion. If your governing body does decide to use an alternative contracting method, make the most of that approach. Don’t undermine intended benefits by prohibiting team members from talking to each other. Such communications may seem to cost you more upfront, but they serve the valuable purpose of ensuring that completed designs can be constructed within your limited budget. If early work and conversations are not desired, a standard design/bid/build approach will best serve your interests.
- Always include the desired contract with all written solicitations. Lengthy (thus costly) contract negotiations can be significantly reduced, or eliminated altogether, if your required contract is issued with your Invitation to Bid or Request for Proposals. Specify that submittal of a bid or proposal indicates agreement with the attached contract terms. Doing so requires bidders and proposers to request contract changes within submitted bids or proposals. Failure to do so waives an awardee’s opportunity to negotiate upon award.
- Once you’ve perfected your procurement, chosen the desired contractor, and executed a comprehensive contract – be sure to follow those contract terms. You might have evidence that a project was poorly completed, a purchase is flawed, or that a contractor failed to properly request multiple change orders. However, if you failed to follow the contract’s payment or claim procedures, you may be precluded from enforcing those terms.
- Before issuing any goods or service procurement, check the Oregon Forward (formerly QRF) website: https://www.oregon.gov/das/opm/pages/oregonforward.aspx.
Contracting with a qualified rehabilitation provider is legally required, if available. (ORS 279.850.)
If an agency is listed that provides the goods or services needed, your entity must contact that company to determine whether it has the capacity to provide the required services. If so, you are required to contract with that agency instead of issuing any solicitation. It is possible that listed companies are too busy or no longer provide the desired services. But if a listed agency is available, negotiations are strictly limited to services. Prices are set by DAS, so even if not competitive, price is non-negotiable.
One benefit of pursuing an Oregon Forward contract is that this type of service contract is exempt from ORS 297B solicitation requirements. ORS 279A.020(4). The contract, however, must still include all required ORS 279B public contracting terms.
- In other contracting news, for the second legislative session in a row, we have determined that no updated public contracting rules are required for 2026! If your entity has adopted its own public contracting rules, as always, LGLG attorneys and staff remain ready and available to assist with any procurement and contracting questions you may have.
If your entity has chosen to adopt its own public contracting rules, be sure to follow them. Make sure that they, not the AG’s Model Rules (OAR’s), are referenced in your procurement and contracting documents.
