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FDOT’s CDL Training RFP: The Price Form Is the Whole Ballgame

The Florida Department of Transportation is in the market for a statewide vendor to train and license its own workforce behind the wheel of commercial vehicles. Proposals for DOT-RFP-27-9018-SJ are due Monday, September 21, 2026 at 9:00 AM, with technical proposals opened that same morning and price proposals opened — along with the intended award announcement — on September 29.

If you are thinking about responding, stop reading everything else in the package and go to Exhibit B. There is a structural feature in that two-page pricing form that will likely determine who wins this contract, and it has almost nothing to do with who runs the better training program.

Before that, the deadline that actually matters right now: written technical questions close Thursday, September 10 at 3:00 PM. That is your last opportunity to get anything on the record with the Department. The 72-hour window to protest the specifications themselves, under Special Condition 15, ran from the posting of the solicitation and is long gone. Whatever is in this document is the document you are bidding.

The pricing form does not measure what the Department will actually buy

Exhibit B asks proposers to price Class A and Class B CDL training in four enrollment tiers: 1–8 trainees, 9–12, 13–16, and 17 or more. Below those four lines sits a fifth: a “Price Rate Average,” described as the figure “Used for Evaluation of Price Proposal.”

Now turn to the Scope of Services. Section 2 tells you that the Vendor must be able to host multiple concurrent sessions across the state “accommodating class sizes between 20-30 students.”

Read those two documents together. The Department will award and pay in the 17+ tier essentially all of the time. But it will score on an unweighted average of all four tiers — three of which describe class sizes the scope says the Department does not run.

That gap is not academic. Consider two proposers. The first prices honestly across the tiers to reflect its actual delivery economics, landing somewhere around $7,500 as an evaluated average. The second prices the three small-class tiers at a nominal figure, because it knows those tiers will never generate an invoice, and prices the 17+ tier at its real number. The second proposer’s evaluated average collapses to a fraction of the first’s — while its actual billed rate per trainee, on every class the Department will ever schedule, is identical.

Price scoring here is relative, not absolute: (Lowest Average Price ÷ Proposer’s Average Price) × Price Points. A proposer whose evaluated average is a quarter of yours does not just beat you on price. It takes nearly all 20 price points and leaves you with a handful.

Two things follow from this, and vendors should sit with both.

The first is that if you price this contract conventionally — building a clean, defensible, cost-reflective rate card across all four tiers — you may lose to a proposer who did not, and you will lose on a metric that has no relationship to what either of you would have charged the State. Understanding the formula is not gamesmanship. It is the minimum diligence required to compete.

The second is that leaning hard into the asymmetry carries real exposure. Special Condition 18 reserves the Department’s right to reject any or all proposals. Special Condition 20.3 permits rejection of proposers whose responses do not “reflect the capability, integrity, or reliability to fully and in good faith perform.” Special Condition 14 authorizes a pre-execution on-site review of your facilities and financial capability. A pricing structure that is transparently disconnected from your cost of performance invites a responsibility inquiry, and it invites a competitor’s protest after the September 29 posting. Florida does not have a formal unbalanced-bid doctrine of the kind federal contractors know from the FAR, but “responsible vendor” does a lot of work in Chapter 287, and an agency that feels gamed has tools.

There is a third path, and it is the one I would counsel: raise it with the Department in writing before Thursday. A question asking how the Department intends to weight the tier averages given the 20–30 student class sizes contemplated in Scope Section 2 does two things. It creates a record. And it gives the Department the opportunity to fix the form by addendum — which protects every proposer who intended to bid straight.

Note the sequencing that makes this urgent. Price proposals stay sealed until September 29. Nobody discovers what happened here until the intended award meeting, and by then the only remedy is a formal protest with a bond.

Your curriculum may stop being yours

The Scope requires “demonstrated experience in developing and delivering approved custom curriculum relevant to the road and bridge construction industry,” and Section 3.1 requires instructor-led presentations built on customized curriculum with job videos tailored to bridge and road construction. For a specialized CDL training company, that curriculum is the business.

Now read Purchase Order Terms & Conditions Section 1.C: all documents, files, and reports “prepared or obtained under this Purchase Order” become the exclusive property of the Department without restriction, and the Vendor shall not copyright any material and products or patent any invention developed under this Purchase Order. Section 5.E is blunter still: any intellectual property developed as a result of the Agreement belongs solely to the State, and the provision survives termination.

Layer on Special Condition 22, which accepts copyrighted material in a technical proposal only with a waiver permitting the Department to reproduce it — and which reminds you that copyrighted material is not exempt from Chapter 119. Your curriculum, submitted to demonstrate capability, becomes a public record subject to inspection.

Special Condition 23 is the only protection available, and it is procedurally unforgiving. Confidential material must be submitted as a separate document, specifically labeled, identifying the specific statute authorizing the exemption. Anything you assert is confidential but place elsewhere in the proposal “will be considered waived by the Proposer upon submission, effective after opening.”

The practical guidance is uncomfortable but clear. Distinguish, before you write a word, between curriculum you are willing to have become State property and curriculum you are not. Demonstrate capability with descriptions, outcomes, and outlines rather than by dropping your proprietary materials into the response. And if something genuinely must be submitted, segregate and label it correctly the first time — there is no cure after opening.

A five-year rate lock with a fuel-indexed escalator

The initial term is two years. Special Condition 31 permits renewal “for a period that may not exceed 3 years or the term of the original contract, whichever is longer” — which, on a two-year base, means three additional years. Five years total.

And: “THE UNIT RATE(s) WILL APPLY TO THE INITIAL TERM AND ANY RENEWAL PERIODS.” Renewal may specify a renewal price “as set forth in the solicitation response except that an agency may negotiate lower pricing.” The direction of travel is one-way.

The only relief valve is Special Condition 39, an equitable adjustment mechanism — and it is expressly indexed to fuel. Unit price adjustments “due to fuel cost increases or decreases shall utilize the Federal Government’s Annual Energy Review,” supported by EIA gasoline and diesel data.

Look at what actually drives cost in this scope: administrative staff, trainers, and FLHSMV-approved third-party testers; DOT physicals arranged with certified medical examiners; medical cards and CLP fees; vehicle acquisition and maintenance; and the establishment, striping, leasing, insuring, and maintaining of skills testing tracks at Department-designated sites statewide. That is a labor-and-real-estate cost structure with a fuel-indexed escalator bolted onto it. Five years of trainer wage inflation and track lease renewals are yours.

Price the tail, not just the first class.

Where responses actually die

A few provisions that eliminate proposers before anyone evaluates the merits:

The 70-point wall. Technical proposals are worth 100 points — Executive Summary 10, Qualifications and Staffing 40, Overall Approach and Methodology 50 — scored independently by a Technical Review Committee of at least three members and averaged. Score below 70 and your price proposal is never opened. With only 20 price points available against 100 technical, this is a qualifications procurement wearing a price tag. Half the technical score rides on approach and methodology alone.

No conference, no presentations. Special Condition 7: no pre-proposal conference. Section 28.2: no oral presentations. There is no meeting where you explain what you meant. The paper is the entire case.

The cone of silence is wider than FDOT. Special Condition 3 tracks section 287.057(25), Florida Statutes: from release of the solicitation through 72 hours after posting of the intended award, proposers and anyone acting on their behalf may not contact any employee or officer of the executive or legislative branch about any aspect of this solicitation, except in writing to the procurement officer. Not FDOT employees — the executive and legislative branches. If you have government relations personnel with standing relationships in Tallahassee, brief them today. Violation “may be grounds for rejecting a response.”

Self-insurance is disqualifying. Special Condition 10 sets general liability at $200,000 per person / $300,000 per occurrence with $200,000 property damage, and Scope Section 7 adds commercial auto at $1,000,000 per accident and $2,000,000 aggregate covering Department trainees operating vendor vehicles. Buried in Special Condition 10: “Policies that include Self Insured Retention (SIR) will not be accepted.” That single sentence can eliminate exactly the large national training providers most capable of statewide concurrent delivery. Check your program structure now — this is not fixable in the two weeks before submission.

Submission mechanics. Three separate PDF documents (Technical / Price / Forms), each named in the prescribed format, 20MB per email, no ZIP files, subject line must read DOT-RFP-27-9018-SJ: Vendor’s Name, and the body of the email must contain no information. Deadline is 9:00 AM. Send early enough that a bounced attachment is survivable.

The forms. Scrutinized Companies certification (375-030-60) is required regardless of dollar value. E-Verify. Foreign Country of Concern Attestation (PUR 1355). Missing or unsigned forms are the single most common cause of non-responsiveness in FDOT procurements, and they are entirely preventable.

Two structural notes worth flagging

Barriers to entry are the story of this procurement. The Vendor must be registered in the FMCSA Training Provider Registry, must be or represent an FLHSMV-approved Third-Party Administrator, must field at least two contracted FLHSMV-approved Third-Party Testers, must be approved to establish new FLHSMV testing tracks including striping, demo, and leasing oversight, and must incorporate FDOT-owned CDL simulators. That is a very short list of qualifying entities in Florida.

Which makes Special Condition 20.2 strategically significant: a proposer may submit only one proposal, but subcontractors may appear in more than one proposal. If you are an approved TPA or hold tester credentials, you can sit on multiple teams. If you are a prime who needs one, understand that your critical subcontractor may be enabling your competitor simultaneously — and paper the relationship accordingly.

Dispute resolution has been narrowed. Special Condition 33.1 expressly removes Paragraph 8(a), Dispute Resolution, from PUR 1000. What remains is Purchase Order Terms & Conditions Section 1.F, under which the Director — identified here as the Department’s Chief Operations Officer / Assistant Secretary — “shall decide all questions, difficulties and disputes of any nature whatsoever,” and that decision “shall be final and binding upon all parties.” Adjustments of compensation and contract time for major changes are left “to the absolute discretion of the Director.” Section 8.E adds a venue waiver permitting the Department to choose the county for any litigation.

Combine that with the 10% non-performance retainage in Special Condition 12 — assessed on the total invoice amount if your corrective action plan is deemed unacceptable, and forfeited entirely if the deficiency is not resolved by the end of the agreement period — and the enforcement posture of this contract is considerably sharper than the modest scope suggests. The Scope’s 90% first-attempt pass rate expectation has no stated liquidated damages, but it does not need one. The retainage is the remedy.

Bottom line

This is a qualifications-driven procurement with a price form that does not measure what the Department will buy, an IP regime that transfers your curriculum to the State, and a rate lock that can run five years against a fuel-only escalator.

The window to influence any of it closes Thursday at 3:00 PM.