A contractor is suing the two irrigation districts connected to the Wyoming-Nebraska tunnel system that suffered a catastrophic failure in 2019, alleging the districts chose who would win the more than $100 million in repair contracts behind closed doors.
Drill Tech Drilling & Shoring Inc. filed a federal lawsuit complaint Monday in the U.S. District Court of Wyoming, against the Wyoming-based Goshen County Irrigation District and the Nebraska-based Gering-Fort Laramie Irrigation District.
The lawsuit asks the court to intervene in what Drill Tech calls an unlawful bidding process that cut it out of the opportunity to win a job on the massive tunnel repair.
It also accuses the Goshen Irrigation District and the Gering-Fort Laramie Irrigation District of violating the public records and public meetings laws of their respective states.
“The awarding of public contracts and expenditure of public funds in excess of $100 million is public business and may not be conducted in secret,” says Drill Tech’s complaint, which Cheyenne-based Holland & Hart LLP attorney Jeffrey Pope filed on the company’s behalf.
Sam Kidd, of Holland & Hart, is also listed as an attorney on the complaint.
“But that is exactly what happened when Defendants… decided to give over $100 million of public construction work to Atkinson Construction LLC,” the complaint continues, “without publicly or competitively bidding any of the work.”
Atkinson did not immediately respond to a Monday afternoon request for comment. Though involved in the complaint’s narrative, Atkinson is not sued in this case.
The districts did not respond to email and phone requests for comment.
‘Fundamentally Changed'
The complaint says the two districts contracted Atkinson to be the construction manager at risk (CMAR) and provide oversight for the Fort Laramie Canal Tunnel 1 and 2 rehabilitation project.
That project is expected to benefit over 100,000 acres of farmland across Eastern Wyoming and Western Nebraska.
Wyoming’s U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman in March announced that the U.S. Department of Interior has chosen to use $100 million of its $889 million One Big Beautiful Bill appropriation on the tunnel project.
The tunnel collapsed July 17, 2019, cutting off irrigation water to the region and flooding fields. The infrastructure was more than a century old.
Temporary repairs restored most of the system’s capacity in time for the 2021 season, but it still needs long-term solutions. Repairs to Tunnel 2 also are in the works, so that it doesn’t suffer the same catastrophic failure.
During the bidding process, the complaint says, the two irrigation districts confirmed that Atkinson would have to comply with Wyoming and Nebraska laws, and that it may be able to self-perform the construction work in the project, but would competitively bid that work.
But 18 months after Atkinson became the project manager, the districts “fundamentally changed the (manager’s) agreement to allow Atkinson to self-perform all the construction work for the Project under the guise of a contract amendment,” the complaint alleges.
This transformed the contract into a standard prime contract for the massive project “with no competition for the construction work,” says the document. And the project manager no longer had to open competition to the public bidding process, it adds.
Drill Tech Drilling and other interested parties were cut out of the process, the complaint alleges.
Asking For Documents
Drill Tech didn’t ask to become the project manager because it wanted to work on the tunnel rehabilitation work packages instead, the complaint says, adding that Drill Tech has experience with the method that project requires.
On July 25, 2025, Drill Tech sent a letter to the two districts, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and one of the project designers HDR Inc to raise concerns that the project manager, Atkinson, was no loner required to bid projects competitively and in public.
Drill Tech noted in that letter that it had been monitoring the project for two years, waiting for the bid advertisement.
Nearly a month later the Gosh District’s attorney acknowledged the district had received the letter and thanked Drill Tech for its “continued interest in the Project,” court documents say.
That December Drill Tech submitted public records requests to both districts under the public records laws of each state, the complaint says, asking for all post-award modifications and amendments regarding the project manager’s agreement, and for a copy of the procurement plan.
The Nebraska-based district never responded to that request, the complaint says. The Wyoming-based district reportedly responded two months later, Feb. 10, 2026.
Goshen District’s public records yield was “heavily redacted,” says Drill Tech’s complaint. The district claimed those redactions were justified as trade secrets, privileged information, confidential commercial, financial, geographical or geophysical data.
The complaint disputes that. It shows a side-by-side comparison of the same page of the scope of the project manager’s services.
The page that was publicly released in the request for proposal, and the page Drill Tech received in its public records request are vastly different, with the latter about 75% or more redacted.
“Reactions such as these were pervasive” throughout the agreement, the complaint says.
Transparency
Copies of the changes to that agreement also had “pervasive redactions,” it adds.
Still, says the document, Drill Tech learned that the agreement was amended before Drill Tech’s July 25, 2025, letter requesting information about whether public bids were still required.
The complaint says the district knew the agreement had already been changed to edge out competitive bidding, but didn’t tell Drill Tech that when the company asked.
The complaint also says the district didn’t provide notice of an important public meeting.
By Feb. 20, 2025, the Goshen District Board voiced concerns about HDR’s original maximum price estimate of $87 million swelling to more than $120 million, the complaint relates from the meeting minutes.
HDR proposed a confidential guaranteed maximum price proposal and non-disclosure agreements so there would be “no worry about (Atkinson) getting underbid,” the document alleges.
There was, the complaint says, no documented vote for Atkinson to self-perform the task they were discussing without publicly bidding the work packages, but the district did vote to approve changing the design plan.
It’s “entirely” unclear what role the Nebraska-based district played here since it didn’t respond to Drill Tech’s public records requests, the complaint alleges.
The document says that on July 8, 2025, the Goshen District and Atkinson signed an amendment to change the agreement, so that the latter was no longer required to advertise bids or publicly open them.
In the July 17, 2025, meeting minutes, “Atkinson was already apparently working with a vendor for the digger shield, but there was no indication that Atkinson has publicly bid or competitively awarded the subcontract for the digger shield.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
