In a letter dated Saturday, Randy Woodbury said “I made no ‘determinations’ on this contractor and was never asked to.”

Dunkirk Department of Public Works Director Randy Woodbury is vigorously distancing himself from a contractor’s lawsuit against the city.

H.H. Rauh Contracting of Jamestown sued the city over a declaration that the company was a non-responsible bidder on a demolition project. The city and Woodbury are named as co-defendants in the Aug. 22 state Supreme Court lawsuit.

The OBSERVER attempted to text Woodbury on Thursday morning for a comment about the case. He didn’t initially respond and an article about the case ran in Saturday’s edition. However, Woodbury texted early Saturday morning after seeing the article — and stated he had not received the original message.

“DPW does not do the bids for anything other than public works projects, these were all (city Planning and) Development Department Division of Building and Zoning projects done under their exclusive authority on their own,” Woodbury wrote.

“I made no ‘determinations’ on this contractor and was never asked to,” he continued. “I have used them before and would not exclude them from DPW projects if they met specifications, and were in good standing with the NYS Department of Labor, which had disqualified them unfortunately for some issues about 10 years ago.”

Woodbury subsequently sent the OBSERVER a formal letter — which also went to John Rauh of H.H. Rauh Contracting — where he defended himself further. The letter was dated Saturday.

“DPW has all of its bids, by city charter and code, accepted or rejected formally by city Common Council public and numbered resolutions, and that is where the DPW director would make any determinations of non-responsible contracting,” Woodbury wrote in the letter.

He added, “That has never been done relative to the suing companies, except for when the state Department of Labor forced the city to reject their bid for Senior Center paving about 10 years ago when companies associated with Rauh had been banned for public work bidding for five years by the Department of Labor (but I do not know those details and obviously and fortunately the ban is now gone).”

Woodbury attached a city government organizational flow chart, highlighting the fact that Public Works and Planning and Development are completely separate departments. “All departments separately and independently follow city procurement and city charter and city code requirements,” he wrote.

The DPW head stated in his final sentences that he first saw the lawsuit when the OBSERVER forwarded him a copy, and that City Attorney Elliot Raimondo “had not even seen the lawsuit, which I then forwarded to him.”

Woodbury added that Raimondo told him that the Planning and Development Department made the original non-responsible bidder determination about H.H. Rauh.