Next Tuesday’s City Council agenda has an item to award a 4 million dollar contract for construction work without a real competitive bid. Read the item here.
I have written about the non-competitive issue before. You should read Saying It Does Not Make it So.
The company in question put a new roof on city hall last year to the tune of 694 thousand dollars. Yes, the city hall that they are about to tear down. Read There They Go Again for the gory details.
Remember that four percent (that is 160,000 dollars) goes to the Harris County Department of Education because the city is buying off of a buy-board! I would think that we could use the money.
I sense that we may be seeing the old two-step here. I have no evidence yet, but I suspect that they are up to something more.
Remember that the city has been telling us that it will take about two million dollars to tear down city hall. That’s the city hall with a new roof, and a new chiller, and a whole bunch of valuable emergency communication equipment that they say will be imploded into the rubble (click here to see $63.9 million and climbing).
Last year the city issued a contract to this same firm for 750,000 dollars. Why the big jump to four million dollars?
Is it possible that the city will use this new contract to get away with tearing down city hall without a real bid? There is probably real value in the salvage. Are they going to claim that they do not have enough time to conduct fair bidding? How long have then been planning to tear down the building? Four percent of 2 million dollars is 80,000 dollars. How much money could we save by conducting a bid with existing city employees? How much would it really cost to tear down city hall if we let the market work? Is there real value in the salvage and are we going to get it or is some contractor going to get it?
So far we have not seen any bidding activity from the city where they are trying to find a contractor to tear it down. The city says it takes about 60 days to run a Request for Proposals. Have they decided to use this new contract? Hide and watch.
Call your city representatives! Be careful not to tell them what to do. Incredible as it sounds that appears to be illegal. Read Cone of Silence by clicking this link.
I wish that we could get the El Paso Times cover these stories. I know that they have to fight cost issues, but it seems to me that they could bring real value to this situation.
We deserve better. Maybe we will get it in the next election.
elpasospeak 
It does not appear that the “shoe in” company for this contract is an El Paso based company. It’s ironic that the downtown redevelopment is being championed under the guise of boosting our local economy, yet the city managers and council do not want to invest the time and effort to ensure that local home-grown businesses have every opportunity to compete for these contracts. It seems that our leaders are in reality more interested in helping out-of-town businesses and Houston schools.
Next, we’ll hear on Tuesday that there wasn’t sufficient time to go through a formal bid process or that there were no other companies qualified to do this work. That’s just not credible, especially given how many months went into pushing through the stadium project, one of the known and recommended outcomes being the demolition of city hall. And the city managers certainly can’t speak to the availability of other qualified bidders if they haven’t run an open bid process.
Our city leaders continually manipulate processes so that they can use timing as a reason to justify their own agenda and their own biased decision-making? Bottom line: they actively work to disenfranchise the taxpayers and voters. Why won’t they simply do the right thing?
P.S. – If, as we were told, a AAA ballpark is going to truly a great magnet for attracting new companies and residents to El Paso, does this mean that Paul Foster — one of the major beneficiaries of the ballpark — will move Western Refining’s corporate offices back to El Paso in time for the opening day of the 2014 baseball season? It sure would be nice to have those jobs back in El Paso. They pay a lot more than jobs hawking peanuts at the ballpark.
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Following up on my last post, if the “shoe in” company for this contract is not an El Paso based company, but has an El Paso office, why does the City of El Paso have to pay Houston (Harris County) in order to get the best price, assuming it even is the best price? The fee to be paid to Houston greatly exceeds the cost to drive across town — and likely exceeds the annual salary of a city engineer or purchasing manager.
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