At the Greater Laguna Beach GOP City Council Candidate Forum, the moderator asked a pointed question about the Promenade on Forest Avenue: why did the winning bid allocate roughly $180,000 for 18 Adirondack chairs—about $10,000 apiece?

The city explained on Instagram that contractors routinely spread labor, overhead, bonding, insurance, and profit across more than 100-line items, meaning no single line reflects isolated retail costs. When asked what due diligence he personally performed before approving the contract, Mayor Mark Orgill deflected:

“We followed the rules given to us by the state for general law cities, and you look at what the lowest bidder was, and that’s what we chose. You have very little leeway to get in there and question various different elements… It’s the bottom-line number.”

That answer might be expected from a layman, but Orgill has held a California contractor’s license for 36 years. Few people in Laguna Beach are better equipped to read a bid schedule—or know what a city can legally demand before opening a bid envelope.

The city should have required an itemized bid with line-by-line labor and material costs. It simply chose not to. That raises concerns about transparency and the opportunity to pad the bid even if it was the lowest one. Certainly, based on the quality of the materials and workmanship of the Promenade it begs that question be answered.

On January 13, 2026, the council unanimously awarded Superb Engineering a $5.5 million contract, authorized up to $1.1 million in change orders, and shifted $4.4 million from other capital projects to cover a funding shortfall. That is a major public expenditure, and the $10,000 chair illustrates how poorly it was evaluated.

Handcuffs that City Used on Itself: Orgill was wrong when he claimed the council was handcuffed by state rules for general law cities. Laguna Beach specifically opted out of default state procedures (Public Contract Code § 20160) by adopting the Uniform Public Construction Cost Accounting Act (§ 22000). While projects must be awarded to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder, nothing in state or local law forces the city to tolerate an opaque bidding format where chairs appear at $10,000 each.

Contractors do not draft the bid schedule; the city does. Agencies across California routinely protect taxpayers through standard safeguards:

• Separating Indirect Costs: Breaking out mobilization, bonding, insurance, and overhead into dedicated lines so they cannot be hidden inside equipment costs.

• Unbalanced-Bid Clauses: Reserving the explicit right to disqualify mathematically or materially distorted proposals.

• Schedules of Values: Requiring detailed labor and material cost breakdowns or placing pre-bid calculation documents into escrow.

During the forum, Orgill conceded that under city code, the council holds the power to reject any or all bids. A council with the authority to scrap a bid package and re-advertise is never powerless. When Orgill admitted in hindsight that “it would have been nice to have” line-item details, he confirmed those figures were entirely obtainable.

In unit-price municipal contracting, line items govern what the city pays during change orders. When the council doesn’t do that and grants $1.1 million in change-order authority, distorted unit prices create costly blind spots.

Laguna Beach residents deserve to know: Did bid documents contain unbalanced-bid clauses? Were indirect costs isolated? And what did council members actually examine before approving $5.5 million for a controversial project?

Improvement begins with honest accountability. When a 36-year licensed contractor sits on the dais as the Mayor during a controversial project, residents expect that expertise to safeguard public funds—not excuse a lack of scrutiny.