The link at the bottom of this post it to an October 12, 2010 video of discussion of item 12B on our City Council agenda. It shows the City Engineer telling City Council that he wants to issue a 1,500,000 dollar contract to a company that has a contract with the Harris County Department of Education.
You will hear and see the City Engineer repeatedly assure council that the contract will only be used for minor work and certainly not for anything that has to be designed. That was step one.
In step two, a short three months later, the City issued a purchase order under this contract to replace approximately 17,000 square feet of ceiling on the 10th floor of City Hall for just short of $95,000. That works out to about $5.59 per square foot. Most people in the construction business will tell you that $2.00 a square foot is a good number to use as an estimate. They also spent some 53 to 54 thousand dollars to replace some roof drains and piping.
Then two months later on March 2, 2011 they modified the purchase order to replace the entire roof of City Hall (per the design work and specifications created by a local architecture firm) with a foam roof for around 543 thousand dollars. For a foam roof!
Let’s summarize–694 thousand dollars on a contract for minor repairs, without requesting bids using a contract that the City Engineer said on camera in a City Council meeting would not be used except for minor projects that do not require design work.
All this on a building that we are about to tear down!
If that is not enough to get you going, be aware that City Council passed 3 million dollars worth of these contracts on October 21, 2010. The Harris County Department of Education (Houston) gets 4% of every dollar spent under these contracts. That comes to $120,000 that Houston will get (if El Paso spends the entire amount) simply because El Paso finds it too burdensome or inconvenient to have the Purchasing Department conduct bidding.
We deserve better.
You can see the video here: The Video (the segment starts about 2 hours, 8 minutes, 20 seconds into the recording–use the slider bar to get there–and lasts about 9 minutes).
elpasospeak 