Mesnard said the changes are in direct response to a scandal in Scottsdale Unified School District, in which the district’s superintendent and other district officials were discovered to have financial ties to an architect who was given a large construction project.

Hunt & Caraway, the architectural firm selected by the school, had paid the district’s superintendent $30,000 in 2016.

Documents also showed that Hunt & Caraway was paid, and the company’s executives knew the firm would receive the contract, before the district had finished its selection process.

The revelation led to the firing of the superintendent and other district employees.

“We don’t want to see what happened in Scottsdale happen in other places,” Mesnard said. “We want to avoid corruption. We want to make sure that taxpayer money is being spent wisely. That we’re being good stewards, essentially.”

But Minter, of the Arizona Builders Alliance, said the changes were made without consulting stakeholders in the construction and architecture industries. Had lawmakers done so, Minter said industry experts would have warned them about the dangers of returning to a low-bid system like what Arizona used until the late 1990s.

Many public works projects ended up in lawsuits, he said, because a low-bid environment creates an “instant adversarial environment” between architects, contractors, subcontractors and project owners – in this case, school districts.

“It becomes a dog fight over the last dollar,” Minter said. “That’s where we end up in lawsuits, and mediations and all these things that drive up everybody’s total cost and don’t enhance the quality of the projects.”

Rebekah Morris, the publisher of Arizona Builders Exchange, a construction trade publication that tracks public procurements, said the changes to the procurement laws for school districts will, ironically, lead to increased costs because of litigation.

“It is counter productive. You’re going a huge step backwards if this actually does take effect,” she said.

Morris said one particular concern with the new law is that there is no definition of “qualified bidders.”

“It could mean anybody with a contractors license,” she said. “It doesn’t mean they do quality work. It just means that they passed a licensing test and they have maintained a minimum bonding requirement with the state.”

Mesnard said he expects the State Board of Education will define “qualified bidders” when it crafts the rules to implement the law.

AZCIR and KJZZ reported in 2017 on the interwoven financial relationships between a small group of architects, construction companies and subcontractors and the school districts in Maricopa County where the companies seek business .

The investigation showed that, between 2013 and 2016, architects, construction firms and subcontractors accounted for nearly all of the financial contributions made to Maricopa County districts’ bond and override campaigns. If voters approved the property tax increases, they funded construction projects sought by the builders.

AZCIR found that nine companies – three architecture firms, three construction firms, and three subcontractors – accounted for half of all public school procurement awards in Maricopa County for bond-related projects. Those same companies gave nearly 60 percent of the money raised by school bond and override campaign committees in Maricopa County during those years. Overall, construction companies accounted for roughly 90 percent of all campaign giving for such campaigns.