Maryland transportation officials have rejected an unsuccessful bidder’s protest of the state decision to award the initial phase of the $11-billion Beltway/I-270 managed lanes project to Accelerate Maryland Partners, a team led by Australia-based Transurban/Macquarie Infrastructure Development.

由基础设施开发商Cintra领导的Capital Express流动合作伙伴，由西班牙承包商Ferrovial拥有，对公私合作伙伴关系的前期阶段提出了马里兰州运输选择过程的几个方面。挑战包括在2020年7月提议者入围后，塔拉城/麦格理替换为球队的首席承包商。

According to protest documents, the Cintra protest asserted that allowing Transurban/Macquarie to make the change represents “an unfair and unrealistic gaming of the evaluation criteria” and “greatly jeopardizes" certainty of the delivery, which it said was "a fundamental feature of the procurement.”

Cintra also claimed that the Transurban/Macquarie bid was based on unreasonably low assumptions for construction costs, and that, absent a lead contractor, the team would be unable “to identify and mitigate construction risks until it is too late.”

Said the protest: “This cannot possibly be the best value solution for the state."

MDOT contracting officer Jeffrey Folden countered that the state-approved contractor change, requested by the Transurban/Macquarie team in October 2020, complied with state law and that the firm’s experience with similar projects in Virginia and elsewhere, plus other factors, would ensure “good-faith performance of the work.”

He also ruled that the protest was untimely. It was filed on March 1, nearly two months after the state's Jan. 8 announcement of the three shortlisted teams that had submitted bids.

Folden also ruled that state agency acceptance of Transurban/Macquarie's financial proposal pricing methodology “was reasonable and consistent with the clear language of the RFP” and justified its analysis, evaluation and scoring of the submitted technical and financial proposals.

MDOT在一份声明中说，它的决心是Transurban/Macquarie提案对国家最有利，与RFP要求一致。其中包括“评估委员会和评估团队执行的技术和业务判断”以及40多名多学科专家。

辛特拉（Cintra）对MDOT高级管理人员的抗议拒绝诉讼的吸引力仍在等待中，尽管没有做出决定的时间表。

该过程可以进一步将州合同奖的最终批准延迟到跨城市/麦格理团队，由该州由三人组成的公共工程委员会（包括该项目的强大支持者拉里·霍根（R），包括州长拉里·霍根（R）。

如果Cintra团队失去上诉，它可能会将其抗议活动带入马里兰州的司法系统，从而提高了法院命令的禁令的潜力，这些禁令将阻止某些或所有项目要素进行。