The Portfolio
What the contractor actually takes on
One site, one contiguous campus, four building purposes. The RFP describes nearly 40 buildings on a 638-acre campus at 1400 Brush Row Road in Wilberforce, about thirty minutes east of Dayton. State reporting from late 2025 counts 42 principal buildings. The mix is residential, academic, athletic and support.
The contractor operates a building management office on campus and takes day-to-day responsibility for building administration, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, repairs and installations. It supplies every tool, meter, gauge, computer, printer, cell phone and two-way radio its crew uses. It obtains and renews every permit. It keeps all building, tenant, contractor and accounting files on site under Ohio records retention rules, and delivers a monthly operating statement with actual-versus-budget variance explanations within fifteen days of month close.
What the RFP does not publish is a building schedule, a square footage total, a bed count, or any condition data. The only physical inspection available was a two-hour walk through roughly 25 percent of the structures, selected by the State, which the solicitation expressly calls illustrative and not representative of current conditions.
Complexity Flags
Three structural issues that change how this gets priced
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The exclusions are not exclusions
Part 1 states that security, janitorial, landscaping, window washing, refuse, elevator maintenance, fire and life safety systems, back-up power and construction are not within the scope of this contract. Elsewhere in the same document the contractor must coordinate inspections, testing and repairs of all fire and life safety systems, schedule their code inspections, coordinate generator and transfer switch service including fuel sampling, and work closely with the university's elevator contractor to keep every elevator operational. The contractor is accountable for uptime on equipment it does not maintain and vendors it cannot direct.
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A flat fee with nothing flowing through it
The $1.9 million annual not-to-exceed has no escalator and no index across the initial term and up to two renewal years. There are no reimbursable expenses of any kind, including travel. All payroll and burden, the on-campus office, all tools and instrumentation, all office equipment, permit fees and safety training sit inside that number. Preapproved repairs fall outside the cap, but the RFP never states a markup, a cost basis, an approval threshold or an approval turnaround for them. The largest variable cost category in the contract has no defined commercial terms.
⚠
Four forms that do not exist
Section 4 instructs offerors to complete Forms 7k, 7l, 7m and 7n. Part 7 contains those same four documents numbered 7i, 7j, 7k and 7l. Forms 7m and 7n appear nowhere in the solicitation, and Forms 7k and 7l refer to different documents depending on which section you read. In a procurement where the State electronically compares proposals against the posted RFP and prohibits any alteration of its language, that is the highest-probability disqualification trap in the package.
Bottom Line
Verdict and rationale
Conditional Bid. High difficulty. Medium submission risk.
This is a winnable contract for a narrow set of firms and a margin trap for everyone else. Because cost carries zero evaluation points, price is not a lever and a low bid buys nothing. The entire 725-point competition sits in the Work Plan, the Staffing Plan and the demonstrated understanding of the work, which together carry 76 percent of the technical score.
The firm that fits is a self-performing institutional operator with in-house electrical, HVAC and plumbing trades, a multi-building campus track record, Ohio registration already in place, and the balance sheet to carry crew payroll monthly in arrears. Brokers who subcontract every trade, single-asset commercial managers, and any operator whose margin depends on reimbursables or markups should pass.
One more thing that no bidder could have priced. In June 2026, six weeks after bids closed, Ohio lawmakers appropriated $29,159,024 for campus renovations on the condition that the university's trustees transfer facilities oversight to the Ohio Department of Administrative Services or another government entity. DAS is the same agency that issued this RFP. Whoever won in the spring signed with the university and may now report into a state agency instead.
Campus Map
One site, not a portfolio. Every building in scope sits inside this perimeter.
Campus centroid and site visit start
Nearest metro: Dayton, ~30 minutes west
Building Mix
Purpose categories named in the solicitation. The RFP publishes no per-building schedule, square footage or bed count.
Residential
Count not stated
Student housing, including Foundation Hall II, the dormitory where a fire alarm system sat inoperable and drew a state fire marshal order for 24/7 monitoring in October 2025. Residential buildings carry the heaviest life-safety coordination load in the scope.
Student housingLife-safety exposure
Academic
Count not stated
Classroom and laboratory buildings plus the Hallie Q. Brown Memorial Library. HVAC must hold 68 to 72 degrees during regular building hours across the whole set, which is the standard most likely to generate complaints in year one.
Classroom / labHVAC comfort standard
Athletic
Count not stated
Stadium, recreation and health facilities. These drive event-driven HVAC load and audio/video maintenance, since the contractor repairs and maintains university-owned PA systems, microphones, speakers, projectors, screens and cabling.
Athletics / recreationA/V systems in scope
Support and administration
Count not stated
Includes the Lionel H. Newsom Administration Building, designated building number one on the campus map and the start point for the mandatory site visit. A 16,000 square foot facilities administration and storage shop opened on campus as a capital project, which is the likely home for the required building management office.
AdministrationShops and storage
Site visit sample
~25% of structures
Approximately ten buildings, selected subjectively by the State, walked in a single morning beginning at 10:00 AM on April 8, 2026. The RFP states the visit is illustrative only and does not purport to be more than a reasonable sample of current conditions. That is the entire physical inspection a bidder received before committing to a fixed annual fee.
Illustrative onlyCondition risk transfers
Key Dates
Twenty-eight days from posting to submission, with the eligibility gate on day nine. This solicitation is closed.
| Milestone | Date | Status |
|---|
| Solicitation posted on OhioBuys, Lot 1 / Round 1 | March 30, 2026, 11:28 AM ET | Past |
| Pre-proposal conference, virtual via Microsoft Teams. Not mandatory. | April 7, 2026, 1:00 PM ET | Past |
| Mandatory site visit, 1400 Brush Row Road. Non-attendance renders an offeror non-responsive. | April 8, 2026, 10:00 AM ET | Eligibility gate |
| Last date to file a pre-award protest, five business days before the due date | April 20, 2026 | Past |
| Inquiry period ends. No responses to questions received after this time. | April 20, 2026, 8:00 AM ET | Past |
| Proposals due. Late submissions are not evaluated and OhioBuys blocks uploads after the deadline. | April 27, 2026, 1:00 PM ET | Closed |
| Contract award | Not specified in the RFP | No public notice |
| Ohio capital budget conditions $29,159,024 on transfer of facilities oversight to DAS | June 2026 | Past |
| FY2023 state audit released, citing material weaknesses and a $105K finding for recovery | July 16, 2026 | Past |
| Contract end date | April 30, 2028 | Future |
| Renewal options: one month at agency discretion, then up to two additional one-year terms | After April 30, 2028 | Future |
Nine business days separated the site visit from the deadline. That was the entire window to walk nearly 40 buildings, build a preventive maintenance program, name every member of the team, negotiate insurance, draft self-imposed service level agreements, and write a cost narrative landing inside $1.9 million. This one was won or lost on readiness, not on effort during the bid window.
Scoring Strategy
725 points available. Cost is worth none of them.
Each criterion is rated zero to five, from Completely Deficient to Excellent, then multiplied by its assigned weight. The offeror with the highest raw score advances. Because there is no cost scoring and the not-to-exceed is fixed, every bidder was expected to land at or near $1.9 million and the competition happened entirely inside the narrative.
| Criterion | Points | Share |
|---|
| Work Plan, addressing how and when the offeror will meet the university's facility management needs | 200 | 27.6% |
| Staffing Plan, including a table of organization with administrative staff and all key staff identified by name | 200 | 27.6% |
| Demonstrated clear understanding of the work, as evidenced by the detailed Work Plan | 150 | 20.7% |
| Previous experience managing multiple facilities simultaneously, with preference for university settings | 100 | 13.8% |
| Offeror profile: company history, comparable past projects, current capability and capacity | 50 | 6.9% |
| Transition Assistance Plan providing orderly transfer of responsibilities to a successor | 25 | 3.4% |
| Total technical | 725 | 100% |
Two thresholds sit underneath the scorecard. The State may reject any proposal receiving a significant number of zeros, and reserves the right to reject any proposal failing to average three out of five of the maximum available points, which is 435 of 725. Scoring Acceptable across the board is the floor, not a pass.
Preferences apply under Ohio Administrative Code 123:5-1-04 at five percent for the first and two percent each for the second and third, for Buy Ohio, Domestic Source End Products and Veteran Friendly Business Enterprise status. On a 725-point base, a full nine percent stack is roughly 65 points, more than the offeror profile and transition criteria combined. Failing to complete the certification counts as not qualifying.
Who Should Bid
Eligibility, fit and the pass case
Eligibility. A representative had to attend the April 8 site visit, and a subcontractor could not satisfy that on the offeror's behalf. An active OhioBuys supplier account was required because paper submissions are destroyed. Ohio Secretary of State registration, or foreign corporation registration, had to be certified. An unresolved Auditor of State finding for recovery bars award outright and also bars renewal.
Ideal bidder. A self-performing institutional facilities operator with in-house MEP trades, a documented multi-building campus or higher-education track record, existing Ohio registration, commercial general liability capacity stacking to $3 million per occurrence, professional liability at $2 million per occurrence and aggregate, and enough working capital to carry payroll monthly in arrears against an institution that has been on state fiscal watch since October 2024.
Who should pass. Brokers and coordinators who subcontract all trades, because the scope assumes an in-house workforce performing emergency repairs and minor projects. Single-asset commercial managers with no campus experience, because 13.8 percent of the score is reserved for multi-facility and university work. Any operator whose margin model depends on reimbursables, pass-through markups or annual escalation, because this contract offers none of the three.
