If all goes as planned, the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are now competing in the NBA’s Western Conference finals, will be playing in a new $950-million arena to be completed by June 2028. For Tulsa-based Flintco, part of the joint venture chosen in March as the new arena’s prime contractor, the selection brought back memories of the company’s costly mistake when it was the existing arena’s main contractor.

Flintco, founded in 1908 just a few years after Oklahoma statehood, had badly under-priced that arena, now known as the Paycom Center, which it completed in 2002 for around $89 million.

The new project has triggered a fresh perspective on what happened.

Back in 1999, a lowest competitive bid was the only legal option for public projects under Oklahoma’s Public Competitive Bidding Act. The city had a $94.5-million budget, with $76.5 million for construction. Flintco threw its hat in the ring for what was then called the Ford Center in the typical price-driven competition. 

The sealed bids were opened on March 11, 1999.

Flintco’s $66-million bid—$10 million below the city’s construction budget and $21 million under the highest bid—secured the contract. Former Mayor Kirk Humphreys called the bid “too good to be true.”

It was.

Flintco’s vice president at the time, Jay Harris, confirmed the reason Flintco left so much money on the table in a story that appeared in the March 12, 1999 issue of the Oklahoman newspaper: the contractor had made a “significant” error in subcontractor price calculations.

According to the Oklahoman, Harris admitted that the true cost neared $73 to $75 million, which aligned with rival bids.

The miscalculation put Flintco at a crossroads. 

Withdrawing risked forfeiting a $3-million bid bond unless the error was legally excusable. City leaders awaited Flintco’s decision, with the city council poised to rule on bond forfeiture.

Dave Kollmann, Flintco’s current western region president, was actually in the bid room when Flintco’s bid number was being calculated.

“Flintco was a local contractor,” he recalls, “and we felt like this job was a great opportunity to kind of step into the next level of contractors doing a 20,000-seat arena. And it was right there in our backyard. So we just, as we say, we pinned our ears right to go after this job.”

Flintco went to its insurance, surety and maintainer companies and asked for a discount for the job.

“We said, hey, you know, we want you guys to bid us competitively, even cheaper than you would bid somebody else, you know, because we’re going to get the job. And if we get the job, you get the job. So it was that kind of mindset, going into it,” Kollmann explains

”We also self-performed concrete ourselves, so we used our own numbers for that.” 

After Flintco won the bid and its strangely low bid price was announced, something unexpected happened.

Kollmann says, “The next day a lot of the trade partners that bid us, saw the bid tab, and then they came to us and said, for example, if their number was $3.2 million, they said, hey, we’ll come do it for $3 million. They squeezed their own number and tried to help us.”

The concept for a new arena in Oklahoma City still is being refined. Graphic: Oklahoma City MAPS program.

That kind of good-faith support went a long way.

After a week’s deliberation, Flintco decided to honor the bid. The Oklahoman reported that “Flintco’s Vice President Mark Grimes said that after ‘long days of hard work and nights of soul-searching,’ the company would honor the bid.” 

“‘Maybe our bid was too good to be true,” Grimes was quoted as saying, ‘”but our acceptance should be no surprise. Flintco is a 91-year-old company built on family values, with hard work being number one.”

Flintco delivered the arena at a cost to Oklahoma City between $87.7 million and $89.2 million—a steal compared to a time when arenas were costing $130 million or more, as Kollmann recently noted. “Everybody banded together to make it work, We got it done on time and well within the owner’s budget. The job ended up fine.”

In 2020, Oklahoma lawmakers amended the state’s public works and public building’s statute to allow construction manager at-risk contracts, where the contractor works closely with designers and owners on cost and scope and then guarantees a maximum price after much of the design is completed and subcontractor packages are thought-through. 

The Thunder’s Success

In recent years in other cities, according to the website Front Office Sports, voter-approved taxes for arenas have been failing. Oklahoma City’s Mayor, David Holt, who supported the sales tax measure, admitted that “cities like ours never have leverage in these situations.” The Thunder’s owner, Clay Bennett, and his partners, never explicitly threatened to leave Oklahoma City, but it is one of the smaller markets in the NBA, and Paycom Center might be considered outdated.

Voters approved the project in December 2023, funded by a 72-month, one-cent sales tax, $70 million from the city’s Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) 4 initiative, and $50 million from the Thunder owners, avoiding any tax hike.

Two other contractors, Austin Commercial and a joint-venture between Turner Construction and Lingo Construction, sought the contract for the new arena.

But in March, the Oklahoma City Council unanimously awarded a construction manager at-risk contract to the M.A. Mortenson-Flintco joint venture.

“And now here we are,” Kollmann says, “Twenty-six years later, getting ready to build the next one.”

Flintco now has many large regional projects under its belt  and Mortenson, the contractor of NBA venues like Chase Center, will collaborate with MANICA Architecture and TVS to refine designs and costs. Conceptual plans should be settled this summer.

At the time of the project award, MAPS Program Director David Todd explained to city council members how the new construction manager at-risk process works.

MAPS Program Director David Todd explained to city council members how the new construction manager at-risk process works. Image: Video screenshot from Oklahoma City Council YouTube channel

The joint-venture, he continued, “will join the design team at an early stage and they’ll be able to help us with pricing and help us understand availability of materials, value engineering and those kinds of things.”

“Later on, you will see bidding of the project at the subcontractor level. So, it will not get rid of that whole (bidding) process. It just pushes it a little bit later in the process and the general contractor will be up front working with us,” Todd reassured the council members.

The new arena will support multiple uses with rapid reconfiguration for Thunder basketball games, concerts, NCAA tournaments and other events. City officials spoke of the project’s expected spark to economic growth, from jobs to vibrant downtown events.

For Oklahoma City, it’s a “full circle” moment, as Kollmann has said, that keeps the city “big league.”