CHAPEL HILL – The vice president for finance for the University of North Carolina system said that an atypical method of hiring contractors could change the way major construction is done in North Carolina, during a telephone interview Tuesday.

            Jeff Davies, the UNC system vice president for finance, said that by educating contractors and allowing every aspect of construction to be bid on, the UNC system would change the construction industry.

            “We alone are going to fuel the industry,” Davies said about UNC plans to incorporate construction firms that have been untapped previously by the state.

            The UNC system’s plan for changing the industry is based on educating contractors and utilizing a hiring system called “construction management at risk”, Davies said.

            Under this system, UNC will hire a project manager to oversee construction at campuses across the state, he said.  The project manager will be in charge of taking bids for all construction work and hiring firms with the lowest bids for each aspect of the work, he said.

            This system will allow the project manager to break-up the bids so that they can be more appealing to specialty firms, Davies said.

            “Ultimately, we hope to change the way we do business in the state,” Davies said.

            The old bidding system allowed UNC to accept a single bid from a general contractor who would oversee the entire project, including the hiring of subcontractors, as well as a series of bids from a general contractor and individual subcontractors, Davies said.

            The UNC system would then be obligated to accept the lower of the two bids, which was usually the latter, Davies said.

            The “shotgun marriages” created by this series of bidding, however, made it difficult for firms to work cooperatively, he said.

            There have already been eight educational sessions for the construction community across the state, Davies said.

            The sessions, which were held in Asheville, Charlotte twice, Greensboro, Raleigh twice, Wilmington and Winston Salem, are an outreach program into local communities to educate firms about all the construction on UNC campuses, he said.

            Davies said that the biggest barrier for the UNC systems success in executing its construction plans is a lack of contractors.

            The construction management at-risk system will allow UNC to attract enough contractors, including small minority firms and large contractors that primarily do work for private companies, to make construction on campuses successful, Davies said.

            The bond program currently has about 17 percent minority firms, well above the state goal of 10 percent, but Davies said that the UNC system wants to extend this figure.

            Davies has served as vice president for finance for the 16 UNC campuses since Aug. 13, 1999.

            The finance division is responsible for the preparation of UNC’s unified budget requests to the North Carolina General Assembly.

*This editorial was writen on June 19, 2001 for a class

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