Board of Estimate and Contract

Board of Estimate & Contracts

The Board of Estimate and Contracts is Rome's purchasing and contracting authority. This body approves how the city spends money on goods, services, and agreements. It reviews and awards contracts, approves purchases and bids, and authorizes the financial agreements that carry out the budget the Common Council adopts.

In practice, it's where the city's spending decisions get formally executed: vendors, public works contracts, professional services, and the like. If you want to see where Rome's money actually goes day to day, the Board of Estimate and Contracts is the room where those commitments are made official.

The Stories We Are Following:

Short on time? These are the three Board of Estimate and Contract threads that you need to know about in Rome Right Now.

Rome Is Pouring Millions Into Its Water And Sewer Systems, with more ahead

Over the past few months, the board's most expensive decisions have been about pipes, pumps, and a dam. In April, the board approved a contract worth up to $3.83 million, its largest of the year, to redesign and rebuild part of the city's sewage treatment plant. In May, it hired engineers for $591,300 to study the city's Boyd Dam, and in June it committed nearly $932,000 to map out and design the replacement of lead water lines.

What ties these together is that most of them are only the beginning. Officials described the dam contract as "the start" of a larger project, and the lead line work is the engineering and inventory step that comes before the far more expensive job of actually pulling old pipes out of the ground. For residents, this is about as close to home as city spending gets. It is about your drinking water, the sewer system under your street, and eventually the water bill that helps pay for all of it.

Rome is Still paying for the tornado, and the bills keep arriving.

More than two years after the storm, tornado recovery has quietly become one of the largest categories of city spending in 2026. In June, the board approved $948,000 to replace tornado damaged roofs and just over $1 million more for other roofing work. In August, it committed roughly $1.33 million to rebuild the West Liberty and James Street parking lots as part of the recovery. Add in the money spent removing and replanting trees, and the total for the year is over $3 million.

What makes this a story to follow rather than a finished one is that the city is still putting recovery work out to bid. The board has already authorized bidding on a second phase of disaster recovery, along with additional tornado projects, which means more contracts and more spending are still to come. Each one arrives as its own line on an agenda, so the full cost is easy to miss unless tracked over time.

A Few Engineering Firms Keep Winning The City's Design Work.

The same company names seems to repeat in 2026. One engineering firm, Barton & Loguidice, has picked up at least five separate contracts this year, covering everything from a downtown streetscape to sewer studies. Another, CDM Smith, holds the two biggest water projects (the Boyd Dam study and the lead-line work) worth more than $1.5 million combined. Firms like LaBella, Greenman Pedersen, and VIP Architecture turn up repeatedly as well.

This isn't necessarily a problem. Unlike construction jobs, which generally must go to the lowest bidder, professional services like engineering and design can be hired based on qualifications and past relationships, which the law allows. But it does mean a small number of firms are steering a large share of the city's professional spending, and that's worth keeping an eye on.