Boosting Capacity for Street Construction and Resurfacing in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

The Challenge:

In an effort to improve Oklahoma City’s transportation infrastructure, voters approved a multimillion-dollar package of initiatives in September 2017. The “Better Streets, Safer City” projects, which comprise $1.23 billion in total over 10 years, provided a unique opportunity to improve the quality of the City’s streets, yet the investments demanded a threefold increase in project spending without significant personnel growth. The Department of Public Works needed to improve the efficiency of its operations and contracting processes as well as attract more qualified bidders to do business with the City.

The Innovation

To facilitate resource implementation while improving the quality of street construction projects, the GPL and Oklahoma City identified issues over the entire public works contracting cycle, established an organizational structure to implement high-priority reforms, streamlined the contracting cycle for design-bid-build public works projects, and enhanced the contracting method for street resurfacing contracts.

The Results

The reforms to the design-bid-build contracting cycle stand to reduce the contract execution timeline by up to ten weeks per contract. The Department also built a foundation to enhance vendor production capabilities and contract management for street resurfacing projects. Future efforts will be geared toward introducing performance payments and building a vendor performance review system.

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