HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — The Supreme Court of Guam has vacated a preliminary injunction which prevented the Guam Department of Education from taking action on two bids won by GTA.
“GDOE issued two invitations for bids for the procurement of plain old telephone services and data transmission services. At the time of the procurement, Pacific Data Systems was the incumbent service provider for the services being procured in the IFBs and GTA was a competing bidder. PDS filed two protests shortly after GTA was announced as the winning bidder for both IFBs,” the high court stated in its order.
After the protests were denied by GDOE and an appeal to the Office of Public Accountability was dismissed for lacking subject matter jurisdiction, PDS filed its complaint for injunctive relief and declaratory judgement in the Superior Court of Guam, “citing efforts by GDOE to formalize contracts with GTA in an apparent violation of the automatic stay,” the order states.
The PDS complaint, however, did not seek a review of the OPA’s decision or denial of the motion seeking enforcement of the automatic stay.
In the Supreme Court’s analysis of GTA’s appeal of the preliminary injunction, the court reviewed GTA’s claim that “there is no extra procurement scheme remedy” under Guam procurement law “that would excuse compliance with the protest and appeal scheme and jurisdictional timelines, which require a retesting part to exhaust all administrative remedies as to each and every claim before seeking judicial review on a particular subject,” the order states.
The high court agreed with the GTA claim.
“Because this action is limit(ed) in scope to the injunctive relief seeking enforcement of the automatic stay under 5 GCA 5480(a) and because PDS did not seek judicial review of the OPA’s dismissal of its protest claims for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, the Superior Court lacked subject matter jurisdiction over any action seeking equitable relief under the Procurement Code. Thus, we need not determine whether the trial court abused its discretion in granting the preliminary injunction,” the court stated in its order.
As such, the Superior Court’s granting of PDS’s motion for preliminary injunction was reversed and vacated and the complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief was dismissed.
A GTA TeleGuam vehicle and equipment are photographed at the company’s Hagåtña facility on Friday, Dec. 22, 2023.
