Caltrans faulted by practicing terrible project management.
If someone underbids the next contractor by $250 million on a job they've never done before, you're supposed to politely laugh them out of the room.
Edit: for the benefit of those now arriving, the title and link have been changed.
Most of the time, you can't, at least not for government projects. Because of procurement laws and rules (designed, among other things, to allegedly be transparent and to provide accountability), a government body is required to accept the lowest bid from the contractor that met all of the requirements. Seeking an "experienced contractor" is usually seen as code for "we want to use our friends" by a skeptical legislative body, so things like tenure and past projects can't be considered.
That has its downsides, too. A common complaint in the EU is that there is no way for small building companies to become large companies. Reason is that, to become a large company, you have to do large projects, and to get large projects, you have to have done large projects.
In the EU, when comparing offers, one doesn't have to pick the absolutely cheapest that meets the requirements, either. A slightly more expensive offer that more than meets the requirements (for example by having much less environmental impact, by requiring less closure time of a road, or by producing something that has lower maintenance costs) can windhover one that just meets the requirements.
I was recently involved in a bid for a government contract where we got perfect scores on all factors, but still lost the bid to a small company with little to no relevant experience, but who claimed they could to the job for a third of the price.
The usual workaround for this is in IT is to sub-contract the necessary portions to those with said experience, so that the packaged team has the experience as a whole, but while that might seem like a loophole, it generally isn't bad because it means that the ones with the experience are the ones doing the work that requires the experience.
Admittedly, this isn't federal, and I don't know how what the bidding requirements are for state work, but if there's no disqualifier for "never done this before", heaven help the state of California.
The lessons, not every job is worth doing and always allow margins for mistakes.
Just in case someone doesn't read the article. ;)
>As the project wound down, ZPMC reaped tangible rewards, sharing with ABF more than $250 million in cost overruns and incentive payments.
This is the equivalent of buying a startup's product on the chance they figured out how to provide value more cheaply. That's not corruption; that's basic market forces.
If the the contractor is not qualified they should be removed from the bid. In NY there was a list of contractors no longer able to bid state jobs that had to be checked as well.