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There’s an old saying in the Legislature when a Senate bill is moved to the House before it is fully cooked:

“Let the House fix it.”

State Sen. Lee Beyer, D-Eugene, said he hates that phrase, but it applies to finally getting public contracting law reform out of the Senate Business and Transportation Committee.

Action on the bill was delayed five times before committee members approved it on Tuesday and sent it to the floor of the Senate with a do-pass recommendation.

They faced a crushing deadline. Unless they approved the bill by the end of the week — when all the Senate bills switch to the House and all the House bills switch to the Senate — the legislation would have died.

The bill amends the conditions under which public agencies can simply hire general contractors directly on public construction projects rather than going through a competitive bidding process.

The delays have been the result of changes in legalistic wording.  Beyer, who chairs the committee, said none of the changes affect the function of the bill.

“This has been frustrating in terms of getting the language straight,” he said.

Beyer said more tweakings will come.

“I think we have a bill that has a lot of changes that will need to be worked on over on the House side,” he said.

The bill, with a skeletal structure put together between legislative sessions by a group of stakeholders, limits the conditions under which agencies can skip the bidding process.

It is also designed to make the system more transparent, compelling agencies to more specifically explain why they are using general contractors.