Shaub accused the engineer's office of "arbitrarily" excluding three local architectural firms from bidding on a county project.

But county engineer Dave McCudden said the three firms were not as qualified for the "specialty project" as the two out-of-county firms his office is recommending to the commissioners for interviews.

"If we have local firms that are qualified, we should go out of our way to allow them to submit a proposal to do work for us," Shaub said. "After we evaluate that, we can decide who maybe is the best. We should not just arbitrarily exclude our local people."

The project in question is designing the $3.5 million forensic center and morgue planned for county-owned property in East Hempfield Township, where the public safety training center is located.

The county wants to hire an architect to begin designing the facility within the next several weeks so construction can begin in spring.

McCudden said that last fall he requested and received résumés from seven architectural firms interested in working on the forensic center project. Several of those firms are based in Lancaster County, he said.

McCudden and two senior staff members reviewed those firms' qualifications and came up with two -- Murray Assocs. of Harrisburg and SGS Architects of Carlisle -- that they felt were best suited to handle the job. The two firms were recommended to the commissioners to be brought in for interviews.

McCudden said he's used the same process to select architects for about 30 building projects since he became county engineer in 1989. He could recall only three projects -- all specialty projects -- for which the county did not hire a local architectural firm.

"This is the way we've done it," he said. "We feel it's fair. We feel it's equitable. We're not asking firms to put in a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money for projects where they may not be in the short list of most-qualified firms."

McCudden said the commissioners have known since this winter that his office did not plan to interview any local firms for the job, but that "it wasn't until a few days ago that we got feedback that there was a problem with our selection."

Shaub argued that McCudden doesn't have a scoring system to determine which firm is most qualified, and that local architects should be allowed to compete for each job right up until one firm is hired.

Al Taylor, a city attorney, agreed with Shaub.

"This approach seems very parental to me," Taylor said of McCudden's selection system.

Shaub said he's just interested in making McCudden's system "better."

He made a motion that three local architects excluded from the final interview process -- The Ray Group, Tippetts Weaver and Beers and Hoffman -- be allowed to participate, but commissioners Dick Shellenberger and Molly Henderson refused to vote with him. They both said they trusted McCudden's recommendation.

All three commissioners did agree, however, to review over the next two months the way the county hires architects to see if improvements to the process can be made. blog comments powered by Disqus