While demolition crews wrestled Friday to pull the last piece of debris from a flawed test out of Town Creek, lawyers in Columbia wrangled over the legality of the $59.6 million Cooper River bridge demolition contract and whether the entire operation should be brought to a halt.

Edward Sloan, a citizen watchdog from Greenville, asked the court to declare the demolition contract void and issue a permanent injunction to immediately stop the 18-month project. Attorneys for the state Department of Transportation argued it would cost between $50 million and $100 million to halt and re-bid the job. The contractors have been at work for almost four months.

'Injunctions are drastic and should be cautiously applied,' said Linda McDonald, the department's chief counsel. 'To stop this project now would cause this department to re-bid (the demolition contract), and would not benefit the taxpayers one iota. It would penalize the taxpayers.'

In June, the state Supreme Court said in a separate ruling in a suit also filed by Sloan against the Transportation Department that the state's preferred method of awarding large contracts - design-build - violated state law. The court ruled the state illegally awarded the $632 million contract to build the Ravenel bridge.

After that case was filed, and prior to the Supreme Court ruling, state lawmakers passed a law that legalized the design-build procurement method. That action made it legal for the transportation officials to solicit bids either by using the design-build method or through competitive bids.

But Sloan's attorney has stated that the new law also is illegal because it was 'bobtailed,' or added to another bill that had nothing to do with procurement laws.

At the hearing Friday, Sloan's attorney, Jim Carpenter, argued that the Supreme Court's decision should apply to this project. The demolition contract was signed before the high court's ruling.

Circuit Court Judge Thomas Cooper focused his questioning on the consequences of a ruling on the project. Cooper must decide if the Supreme Court decision from July should apply retroactively and whether the cost of re-bidding the project outweighs that ruling.

Cooper said Friday the matter was too complicated for him to decide it in one hearing. He asked each side to file by Nov. 11 additional paperwork on how they believe the case should be decided.

Meanwhile, divers and demolition crew members pulled the last bit of roughly 500 tons of debris from the bottom of Town Creek. The retrieval ends a 17-day recovery effort that began Oct. 11 after an unknown number of explosive charges failed to explode, dropping the Silas N. Pearman Bridge's span over Town Creek into the water largely in one piece.

The next major step in the bridges' demolition will occur in November, when another part of the Pearman Bridge over Drum Island and Town Creek is dropped.

Awarding contracts

For more than a decade, the state Department of Transportation has used two methods to award construction contracts: competitive sealed bids and design-build or 'requests for proposals.'

Design-build

One contract includes both the design and construction of the project.

Projects typically completed faster and with fewer cost overruns.

Allows for subjective evaluations to be made when awarding the contract. This is viewed as both an advantage and disadvantage of the process.

Price doesn't have to be the primary criterion for evaluating the proposal.

Limits the number of potential vendors who can submit proposals because construction companies without design capabilities or smaller contractors cannot make proposals.

Competitive sealed bid

Each component of a construction project is put out to bid as a separate contract. Elements are not grouped together under one contract.

Company with the lowest bid must receive the contract.