This week’s city council agenda asks for permission to issue a three year contract for parts and labor to a local Ford dealer.
The deal is the result of a real bid instead of using a buy board. This is good. I congratulate the local dealer.
What bothers me about it is that while there are four Ford dealers in El Paso, only one of them bid. Why? It is possible that the other three did not want the business? Why? Something is wrong. The annual amount of business involved for the dealership is almost half a million dollars.
I don’t know why only one local dealer submitted a bid. My guess is that the three others think that dealing with the city is not worth it. Maybe they thought they did not have a chance. On the other hand some might say that there was collusion among the dealers. I doubt it.
I do know that when only one firm out of several submits a bid there is probably something wrong. City management in prior years considered this kind of situation a red flag and would work to get competition going.
By the way, one out of town dealer also submitted a bid. This dealer’s part prices were consistently lower than the one city staff wants to give the contract to. The out of town dealer was disqualified. From reading the agenda backup it looks like not quoting a price for local labor was the reason.
If the bid specifications clearly required a local service shop, then why did the out of town dealer spend the time and money to bid? Once again I am guessing here when I say that I suspect that the specifications were not clear on the labor issue. A look at the backup material shows city staff not paying attention again. This was a Ford related bid. The bid tabulation shows “SERVICE AND REPAIR OF VARIOUS GMC/CHEVROLET MODELS PERFORMED BY MECHANICS CERTIFIED BY GMC/CHEVROLET”. The bid tabulation is primarily an internal document. I hope that the bid specifications did not contain this error.
Evidently Scrivener has a relative working in the purchasing department.
I know many business people in El Paso that simply will not even bid for city business. The consensus within this group is that it is too hard to get beyond the favoritism and then too unpleasant to deal with the city if they do get the business. To them it is simply not worth the trouble.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
District 8 Rep. Cortney Niland’s husband’s lighting company has been “winning” city contracts for street lighting. Hum…
here’s one http://www.elpasotexas.gov/muni_clerk/agenda/08-28-12/08281209B.pdf
…and she just made it on to the El Paso MPO. El Paso Times “Our Views” section calling her a forward thinker.
I say her forward thinking benefits her and the developers and business owners who helped fund her election.
http://www.elpasotexas.gov/muni_clerk/2011_05_14_general_election_campaign_records.asp
or
http://deepinsideelpaso.blogspot.com/2011/10/deep-inside-city-rep-cortney-niland.html
She just reversed putting River Bend Drive back on the Major Thoroughfare Plan, a 1.4 mile stretch of upper valley neighborhood road that borders her walled in community “The Willows.” (Willows lighting by Niland Lighting Co., btw)
She’s been pushing this plan since she got elected; and the term I keep hearing in the now 7 to 9 million dollar plan for the road is “LED dark sky lighting.” Hum…
Watch for a lighting project coming to your neighborhood real soon; like it or not.
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Niland and other “shady” city council member’s expenditures list The Forma Group
http://www.elpasonews.org/2013/06/who-is-the-forma-group/
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