The lowest bid submitted by a local company with a previous work history of completing construction projects satisfactorily, would seem to be an ideal situation. Too ideal, apparently, according to SFA regents, who decided Friday against awarding the contract for construction manager for the $9 million DeWitt School of Nursing project to J.E. Kingham of Nacogdoches in favor of a Dallas firm.

To some of the regents, it is variety, not a proven work record, that is the spice to be highly prized. So much so, regents are going to give the higher bidder, Dunn South Central of Dallas, the opportunity to lower their bid by $400,000 in order to match Kingham's.

"I think it is very healthy for us as a university to have fresh blood and new people come in," said regent Valerie Ertz, one of four regents who voted against awarding the contract to Kingham.

If "new and different" automatically equated to "better," we might agree.

But all things being equal — and trustees say that Kingham's work is, or better — we fail to see how offering a Dallas company the opportunity to meet a local company's price benefits SFA or the community.

One regent, Richard Boyer, said he preferred Dunn because the company had worked most recently on a similar project. While reasonable, that seems hardly enough advantage warrant paying an extra $400,000.

Of course, the regents' plan isn't to pay Dunn an extra $400,000 for the "fresh blood" or recent experience. Their plan is to ask Dunn to cut their price by $400,000 and if they don't, award the contract to Kingham.

The regents apparently see this as a viable option, as they voted unanimously in favor of the plan, although one regent did say that he didn't think it was realistic to expect the company to lower their price by $400,000.

Neither do we.

In fact, we'd be worried if the company were to agree to the proposal. The $400,000 will have to be made up somewhere, since it seems unlikely that a company would bid out a job with nearly half a million dollars in easily trimmed "fat."

Even so, we're not sure why regents would risk compromising a construction project, even slightly, simply to give one construction company an advantage over another — especially a company that is located outside the SFA community of Nacogdoches.

It's not fair to punish J.E. Kingham Construction Co., for offering good work at a fair price, which is what the board of trustees appears to be doing in this case.

If other companies in other cities can't, or don't want to compete, that's their problem, not ours, and not SFA's.