Sometimes a short street tells a long story.
That is what I came away thinking after sitting down with Gerald Beard, the former public works director for the City of Jackson and a longtime construction manager who volunteered to help St. Richard Catholic Church pave Druid Hill Drive, the street that serves the church’s new elementary school campus.
The facts alone are enough to make a taxpayer sigh. It’s a cautionary tale for those who think state control of Jackson will lead to miraculous efficiencies.
The Legislature appropriated $395,136 to fix Druid Hill Drive. Beard had produced that number in a hurry, but not out of thin air. It was a practical estimate for a mill-and-overlay repair. Later, Neel Schaffer’s own repair estimate came in at $398,700 — essentially the same number. So the original appropriation was not some wild guess. It was in the ballpark from the beginning.
But instead of fixing the street, the state system first tried to turn the project into a rebuild. The cost estimate ballooned to more than $3 million. Then it dropped to roughly $2.6 million after contingency was trimmed. Then it came down again to about $1.9 million and later about $1.8 million. All this for a street only about a quarter-mile long.
That was the first lesson of the Druid Hill saga: once the machinery of public procurement starts moving in the wrong direction, common sense can get buried under process.
Beard’s basic argument is simple. The state’s Department of Finance and Administration is structured to be a bookkeeper, not a builder. It knows how to keep accounts, route approvals, and manage paperwork. That is not the same thing as knowing how to deliver small street projects efficiently, economically, and transparently.
In Beard’s telling, DFA and the Capitol Complex Improvement District lost months deciding what they could legally do, then months more pursuing the wrong scope, then more time trying to push the work through a project-manager structure that looked a lot like a no-bid system with extra steps.
That ought to concern people.
No-bid contracting, or quasi-no-bid contracting, always comes wrapped in the same promise: efficiency. The pitch is that if government can skip the nuisance of open competition, work will move faster and cost less. Sometimes that may be true in a genuine emergency. But when “efficiency” becomes the standing excuse, it too easily turns into a cover for cozy arrangements, weak price discovery, and too many people feeding at the same trough.
That is what Beard fears Mississippi is drifting toward.
On Druid Hill, the first pricing he heard through the project-manager route was roughly $500,000 to $550,000. Once he made enough noise to force a traditional bid, the price dropped to $223,335. Even though only one bid came in, the number collapsed the moment the work had to face a more formal process. That should make every legislator sit up straight.
To be sure, the final cost did not stay there. With change orders and field conditions, the total ended at roughly $469,000. Some of that extra work appears to have been legitimate. There were utility problems, base issues, and repairs that had to be made once the project was underway. Beard himself says a fair final number might have been around $425,000, perhaps somewhat more depending on site conditions. So this is not a fairy tale in which one pure estimate was ruined by villains in dark rooms.
But that is not the point.
The point is that the state took 21 months to administer a project that required eight weeks of construction. The point is that the system wandered through legal uncertainty, scope inflation, managerial layering, disputed pricing, and opaque change-order handling before finally producing what should have been the easy part all along: a repaired street.
That is not a one-off annoyance. It is a warning light.
The first reform Beard recommends makes too much sense to ignore: fund the design first.
Too often, lawmakers are asked to fund projects before anybody really knows what the project is. A mayor, a church, a neighborhood group, or a legislator says a road needs fixing. Somebody asks for a number. A number gets produced quickly. Then, after the money is appropriated, the state starts asking the questions that should have been asked before the appropriation: Is this a repair or a rebuild? Are the utilities sound? Are there right-of-way issues? Are there permitting problems? What does the preliminary engineering show? What is the realistic probable cost?
That is backwards.
The Legislature should appropriate modest money first for preliminary engineering and design. Let professionals define the scope, coordinate utilities, identify conflicts, and produce a credible cost estimate. Then lawmakers can decide whether to fund construction. That is how you reduce surprises, shrink change orders, and give the public a real number instead of a hopeful placeholder.
Beard’s second point is also worth hearing. DFA should not be the state’s default construction brain. Mississippi needs either a separate procurement arm for construction or a dedicated design-and-construction management division staffed by people who live and breathe these projects. Construction work is not just invoices and approvals. It is staging, scheduling, utility coordination, field inspection, constructibility review, right-of-way, and cost control. That is a different skill set.
His third point may sound technical, but it matters: on street and utility work, the state should move away from lump-sum pricing and toward unit pricing.
That is not contractor jargon. It is taxpayer protection.
Under unit pricing, the job is broken into measurable pieces — excavation, asphalt tonnage, curb and gutter, pipe, undercut, base, milling, and so on. Everyone knows the quantity and the unit price. If actual quantities change, the public can see what changed and why it changed. It becomes easier to evaluate change orders and harder to hide slop inside a single round number.
Lump-sum pricing has its place, especially in vertical building work where the components are highly integrated. But on roads, drainage, and utility jobs, unit pricing makes the process more transparent. It is easier to audit, easier to explain, and harder to game.
That matters because change orders are where public trust often goes to die.
A legitimate change order is not corruption. Sometimes conditions differ from what was expected. Sometimes the owner changes the work. Sometimes a buried problem only shows up after construction starts. But if the underlying scope was fuzzy, the pricing was not transparent, and oversight was weak, then change orders stop looking like honest adjustments and start looking like the back door through which the real deal is finally delivered.
That is why Beard’s frustration deserves attention beyond one church and one street.
Druid Hill Drive is fixed now, and by Beard’s account the workmanship is good. That is important. Citizens want roads that last, not just low bids that fail. But quality work and a bad process can coexist. In this case, they apparently did.
Mississippi should take the lesson while it is still small enough to see clearly. If this much delay, confusion, and pricing fog can gather around one short neighborhood street, what happens on bigger jobs with more money at stake?
Taxpayers do not need miracles. They need a system that knows the scope before it funds the work, bids public jobs openly whenever possible, uses the right pricing method, and puts construction decisions in the hands of people who know construction.
That would not eliminate every problem. But it would at least move the state back toward a culture where the goal is to build the road — not to build a bureaucracy around it.
