JEFFERSONVILLE — The Joint Board for the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project gave the nod to Kapsch TrafficCom IVHS Inc. to provide, operate and maintain the system that will collect tolls on the Kennedy Bridge and two new area bridges.
The contract, which is worth $39.86 million, will not be executed until the Indiana Finance Authority holds a public hearing Sept. 29 and gives its final approval Oct. 16. The joint board’s action Monday at the Sheraton Louisville Riverside in Jeffersonville sets the process to hire a tolling operator in motion, said Kentucky Transportation Cabinet Secretary Mike Hancock.
“Tolling is something, frankly, we’d prefer not to do, but with a project of this size and this cost, unfortunately the traditional funding available simply isn’t enough to pay those costs,” Hancock said. “Tolling is a necessary component of what we have to do to see this project move forward in this area.”
Once ratified, the contract with Kapsch will be for a period of seven years, and the amount being paid is not dependent upon the amount of toll revenue collected, said Indiana Public Finance Director Kendra York with the IFA. York called the process by which the tolling provider was selected “a bi-state, very collaborative process.”
York gave a presentation at the meeting that explained the process. According to York’s presentation, six companies were named to a short list in January after responding to a request for qualifications in October 2013.
Of those six, four companies submitted proposals. In addition to Kapsch, Transcore LP, Xerox State & Local Solutions Inc. and Sanef Operations America submitted proposals.
The evaluation process included a technical evaluation and a price evaluation, and each evaluation was conducted independently, with three representatives from each state performing technical evaluations and one representative from each state performing the price evaluations.
The technical scores and the price scores were then combined to generate a total proposal score, with 400 of 1,000 possible points coming from the price evaluation and the remaining 600 from the technical evaluations. Kapsch had the best score of the four, York said.
York declined to provide more details on the evaluation process, but denied that Kapsch’s prior involvement in the ORBP — Kapsch provided the preliminary transponder readers currently installed on the Kennedy Bridge to collect traffic data — had anything to do with their selection as the tolling provider, but conceded that Kapsch’s knowledge of the ORBP could create “efficiencies.”
The joint board will have some options when Kapsch’s tolling contract expires.
“We have some flexibility on that,” York said. “Right now, I would say that we would bid it out again, but we would have some flexibility on that in seven years.”