The Pattern

Two numbers have been circulating in the Simon Sanchez High School story this spring: eighty-six million dollars and one hundred ninety-five million dollars. The first is the bid that lost. The second is the bid that won. Stated baldly, the math is offensive — the higher number is more than twice the lower — and the public reaction has been predictable.

Kandit News is running an investigative series on this procurement under the title Behind the Bid, and the documentary record it has surfaced is the starting point for what follows.¹ What that record makes clear is that the price gap is not the main scandal. The main scandal is how a single procurement managed to fail in so many ways at once — and how a government that has been trying to rebuild this school since 2014 keeps reaching the same impasse through the same agencies and the same explanations. Only the beneficiaries change.

A brief refresher on the structure. Guam does not buy schools the way most jurisdictions do. Public Law 37-22, the Ma Kåhat Act of 2013, requires that Simon Sanchez be built under a public-private partnership: the developer finances, demolishes, designs, builds, and leases the facility back to the government for up to thirty years.² At the end of the lease, the school reverts to GovGuam. What the bidders submit is therefore not an invoice to be paid on completion. It is the principal amount each developer intends to raise — typically through tax-exempt bonds — and that the government will service through annual lease payments. The legislature has capped that principal at roughly $166 million.² The bid is not a price tag, but it is a commitment to pay back. A $109 million difference in principal is not a rounding error.

Neither, however, is the cost of an award that cannot be delivered. Procurement professionals on the mainland call this trap buy cheap, buy twice. A bid that wins on price and then fails — through change orders, performance-bond claims, or outright termination and re-procurement — frequently lands the government above the bid it originally passed over, plus years of additional delay. Guam's consumer inflation has run between roughly 2.5 and 8.7 percent annually over the past four years, and construction inflation typically tracks above CPI.³ Two more years of delay at those rates would add tens of millions to whatever bid emerged from a second go-around, before another double-session class graduated from a campus that is not its own. Core Tech's number is not defensible because it is higher; nor is GPS's because it is lower. A procurement system worth the name would test both claims before accepting either.

Begin with the record. The Department of Public Works announced Core Tech as the top-ranked offeror on June 12, 2025, with a groundbreaking scheduled for November 20.⁴ When GPS, the second-ranked offeror, asked to see the full procurement record before the award, what it received on November 17 was, according to its hand-delivered protest filed two days later, a record so incomplete that it "cannot as a matter of law be used to support a contract award." DPW subsequently released what it then called the "complete" procurement record — but only after the protest forced its hand.

The 2016 echo is impossible to ignore. In that procurement, the prior Simon Sanchez RFP was canceled after the Office of Public Accountability found that DPW had "failed to thoroughly review the responsiveness of the proposals" and that the procurement record was incomplete.⁵ That protest was filed by Core Tech. This one is filed against it. The companies have changed places at the table; the table itself has not.

Then there is the cap. The legislature authorized $166 million in principal. Core Tech's price proposal of $195.5 million exceeds that ceiling by about $30 million. In a procurement system designed to protect public funds, a bid that exceeds the statutorily authorized funding should never reach evaluation. The cap should function as a gateway: any proposal above the ceiling is non-responsive on its face and is set aside before scoring begins. Instead, this proposal was scored, ranked first, selected, and defended — and the response, when the cap problem became inconvenient, has been a bill to raise or sidestep the cap.⁶ That is not procurement reform. It is procurement-by-statute-of-convenience.

The opposite question applies to GPS — though the comparison turns on a distinction worth drawing carefully. Eighty-six million dollars for a 300,000-square-foot hurricane-rated school works out to about $288 per square foot in financed principal. The closest Guam-specific benchmark is the Office of Public Accountability's 2014 performance audit of the Tiyan Campus Tax Credits Program, which published, side by side, both the financed principal and the total all-in lease cost per square foot for every Guam school built or acquired through leaseback or comparable financing in the prior decade. On a principal basis — the apples-to-apples comparison with the SSHS bids, themselves principal amounts under the proposed lease-leaseback — the prior schools came in at $283 per square foot for Okkodo (2008), $244 for John F. Kennedy (2011), and $285 for Tiyan (2014).⁷ Adjusted for construction inflation through late 2025 using a standard industry cost index, those figures translate to roughly $474, $375, and $405 per square foot in 2025 dollars.⁸ GPS's $288 sits about a quarter below the lowest inflation-adjusted benchmark; Core Tech's $652, by contrast, exceeds the highest by more than a third, and the inflation-adjusted average by more than half. A functioning procurement system would require both: an offeror whose price falls materially below an independent cost estimate to demonstrate, in detail, how the number can be honored; and an offeror whose price falls materially above the historical benchmark to demonstrate, in detail, what the additional money buys. Guam's does neither.

A fair objection here: what if a procurement cap is genuinely set below the realistic cost of the work? The Legislature has shown how to answer it. The Ma Kåhat Act was reenacted in 2023 (Public Law 37-22) to update the authorization in light of what the completed design work indicated the project would cost.² The procedural remedy for an outdated statutory ceiling is legislative amendment — before the RFP issues, with the revised number disclosed to all offerors on equal terms — not scoring an over-cap bid, selecting it, and then asking the Legislature to ratify the result after the fact. The first sequence preserves the integrity of both procurement and statute; the second collapses the difference between them. In the present instance, the cap appears to do its work: $166 million implies roughly $553 per square foot — about $79 above the highest inflation-adjusted historical principal for a comparable Guam school, and roughly $135 above the inflation-adjusted historical average.

The most consequential disclosure in Kandit's series, though, is structural rather than dollar-denominated. According to Part 2, the 2023 procurement was designed by a team of mostly governor-hired political appointees who established a two-tier evaluation system that "gave no weight or consideration whatsoever to the price each offeror proposed to build SSHS." That is the explanation for why GPS's protest is about Core Tech's cap violation rather than about the $109 million difference between the bids. Price never entered the ranking. A two-point technical-scoring margin therefore decided a procurement in which the largest variable — what the school would cost the people of Guam — was, by design, invisible to the scorers. There is no procurement textbook in which that is acceptable, and no version of Guam law in which a publicly funded contract should be awarded under those rules.

And when DPW invoked the substantial-interest mechanism that allows a project to proceed during a pending protest, an OPA hearing officer rejected the determination on two procedural grounds: missing written concurrence from the GDOE superintendent, and a justification that failed to articulate why bypassing the protest process was necessary.⁹ Even the emergency exit was deployed defectively.

A procurement system that produces this many failures in a single transaction is not unlucky. It is missing structural protections that other jurisdictions take for granted, and the failures visible at Simon Sanchez map onto them with unusual clarity.

Price realism analysis, required of federal procurements under FAR § 15.404-1(d) but absent from Guam's procurement code, would have flagged GPS's $288-per-square-foot bid before evaluation — not as automatic disqualification, but as a known warning signal that triggers a documented feasibility analysis.¹⁰ Competitive pricing through concurrent sealed envelopes — price proposals opened after technical ranking and evaluated competitively, rather than negotiated exclusively with the top-ranked firm — would have eliminated the two-tier system that excluded price from scoring entirely. Digitization of the procurement cycle, modeled on South Korea's KONEPS platform, would have made it impossible for DPW to present an incomplete record as the basis for a $195 million award: a system that enforces compliance by design refuses files that are not chronologically ordered, indexed, and traceable.¹¹ Default disclosure of the procurement record after award, paired with implementing rules under 5 GCA § 5251 — which already designates the record as public — would discipline every step by making public review routine.¹²

Two further structural protections deserve mention. A cap-compliance gateway — any proposal that exceeds a statutory financing ceiling is found non-responsive at intake and is not scored — would have caught Core Tech's $195 million bid before it reached the evaluation committee. The current system has no such gate, which is why a bid the law could not fund proceeded to ranking, selection, and defense. Time-bound protest resolution, currently before the Legislature as Senator Parkinson's Bill 243-38, would prevent the years-long pattern in which any protest paralyzes a project entirely.¹³ The Parkinson bill addresses the automatic stay; a broader package should also impose hard deadlines on agency review and OPA decision, and consider a modest bonding requirement for high-value protests, refundable on success and forfeited on failure.

None of these reforms would have built Simon Sanchez High School in 2014, when the promise was first made. None of them will give the class of 2026 a campus they recognize as their own. But the cost of not adopting them is visible right now, on a closed campus in Yigo and in the double sessions at JFK. A government that cannot run a clean procurement for one school will not be trusted with much larger procurements still to come — a $500 million medical campus, a $60 million prison, $575 million in utility and port bonds.¹⁴ The Sharks deserve their campus. The island deserves a system that does not require a generation of children to be its quality-assurance department.

Disclosure: The author rents his residence from a Core Tech entity. He has no other relationship — personal, professional, or financial — with Core Tech International, General Pacific Services, or any other party named in this piece, and has received no compensation in connection with the Simon Sanchez procurement.