A federal judge declined Thursday to make Wyoming and Nebraska irrigation districts open a competitive bid for the sake of a drilling company that missed out on the chance to bid a $100 million job on the Goshen County tunnel project.
But the judge also ruled that Drill Tech Drilling & Shoring Inc. has a valid case, at this phase, in claiming that the Wyoming-based Goshen County Irrigation and Nebraska-based Gering-Fort Laramie Irrigation Districts violated their states’ public-records laws by not giving information the company had requested.
Lock In
Drill Tech Drilling & Shoring Inc. filed a federal lawsuit against both districts in May.
The lawsuit asked U.S. District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl, of Wyoming, to intervene in what Drill Tech called an unlawful bidding process that cut it out of the opportunity to win a job on the massive tunnel repair.
One of the two 119-year-old tunnels suffered a catastrophic failure in 2019. The other is reportedly in dire need of a rebuild.
The districts assigned Atkinson Construction LLC as construction manager at-risk (CMAR) over the project, which means Atkinson can oversee and work with subcontractors, court documents say.
Drill Tech alleged that for the $100 million drill project it had sought to perform, the irrigation districts should have held — and didn’t hold — a competitive bidding process. The districts gave the job instead to their CMAR, Atkinson, court documents say.
In his Thursday order, Skavdahl countered.
He said the laws of both Wyoming and Nebraska appear to support the CMAR’s authority to self-perform this kind of work. Drill Tech has not shown substantially that it has a right to enter a competitive bidding process for this project, he added.
Skavdahl wrote that requiring the districts to pause or backtrack their work and hold that bidding process could harm the agricultural community by stalling the long-awaited repairs even longer — and he declined to do that.
The public has an interest in government entities abiding by the open bidding process, wrote Skavdahl.
“On the other hand, the Irrigation Districts are right that ensuring irrigation water to the thousands of acres of farmland served by the tunnels is also in the public interest,” he added. “In light of Drill Tech’s failures (to show it deserves court intervention) as well as the serious risks to the farmers and public from another tunnel collapse following any delay in this construction project, the preliminary injunction requested by Drill Tech is more contrary to the public interest than in support of it.”
Drill Tech had waited several months to sue, though it had reportedly learned it had been cut out of the job last summer, Skavdahl noted.
He declined to let that delay kill the case altogether, but he factored the delay into his decision not to order the open bid.
The judge’s order doesn’t end the case. It just denies Drill Tech’s request to have Skavdahl intervene in this early phase.
Skavdahl gave his early conjectures that Drill Tech isn’t likely to win on the bidding question, only for the purposes of declining to compel the districts to change course immediately.
Might Win That One
Drill Tech had also accused both irrigation districts of violating their states’ open meeting laws and assigning the job in secret.
Skavdahl said the company looks unlikely to win that challenge as well.
But, the judge wrote, Drill tech appears likely to win two of its claims: that the Wyoming irrigation district and the Nebraska one both violated their states’ public-records laws by not giving Drill Tech information it had requested.
Background
The complaint says the two districts contracted Atkinson to be the construction manager at risk and provide oversight for the Fort Laramie Canal Tunnel 1 and 2 rehabilitation project.
That project is expected to benefit more than 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, Drill Tech’s complaint alleges, the two irrigation districts confirmed 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 Drill Tech’s complaint.
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 says.
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 Atkinson was no longer 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 Goshen County Irrigation 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 because 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.
