This week’s El Paso city council agenda has several purchasing contracts on it.
I notice that city staff is not using the term “low bidder” much anymore. Instead they use the term “best value” which can lead to all sorts of subjective interpretation.
An agenda item that caught my attention was number 8B on the agenda. The city wants to purchase brake lines and services for their fleet. You can see the backup material for the agenda here.
There were three bidders. The city’s evaluation method resulted in a score of 38.41 (out of a potential 100) for the highest priced bidder, 68.38 for the bidder with the second lowest price, and 79.67 for the lowest price bidder. The evaluation considered cost, reputation and quality, operational information, employee benefits and past performance.
Best value
City staff is not recommending the bidder with the highest evaluation score and that also had the lowest prices, but suggests giving the award to the 2nd place bidder.
If staff gave the firm the highest subjective rating and the firm had the lowest price, how can they not be the “best value”?
the city complains of not getting a price list.
Is this sloppy paperwork from city staff, or is this more favoritism?
Poor form
Then item 9B proposes the award of a $70,757.60 contract for construction services. The low bidder offered a price of $44,408.83 but staff recommends that they be declared “non-responsive for not filling bid proposal form correctly”.
There is probably more to this story but the city’s stated reason seems problematic given the number of things Scrivener has made mistakes on in the city attorney’s office.
No bid
Item 9C shows more playing with words. The backup material for council says “This is a low bid, unit price contract”.
Baloney! The bid package told bidders “The project will be awarded to two bidders: the lowest base bid and the 2nd lowest base bid”.
The bid package then went on to tell bidders “The estimated base expenditure for each contract is $100,000 per year for two years for a total amount of $200,000 per contract”.
The city evaluated two bids. One was for $322,580 and the other was for $473,700.
City staff proposes giving each firm a contract. I guess it will be up to staff to decide which firm gets what portion of the business.
On a positive note
City staff has placed other purchases on the agenda that actually would award the business to the lowest price, competent bidder. That’s a start.
We deserve better.
elpasospeak 
Why even waste time bidding on city business? It’s just another rigged game.There was a time when big rigging was a crime. Now, government simply creates policies and procedures to enable it to legally manipulate the awarding of contracts. It’s disgusting.
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Item 9B – the “low bidder” left two bid items totally blank (look at the attachment – the bid tab) and asked to withdraw his bid – I am sure his bonding company forced that issue too. He screwed up – no “there, there”. So it goes to the next lowest bidder.
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Yes, I see.
My point is that the tab sheet should have left this bidder off.
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You can’t do that. Bids are opened and publicly read. You must put all bids on the tab sheet – regardless of whether or not they completed the bid documents correctly. Notice they list whether the bidder provided a bid bond or not, or acknowledged the amendments. If they fail to include the bid bond and/or fail to acknowledge amendments they are automatically thrown out – but because its a public bid their bid is included in the bid tab and it will show if they failed to provide a complete bid. That’s transparency.
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then they should have received fewer points for their pricing on the bid tab
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Brutus – horizontal construction – aka “sitework” construction is not subject to the Competitive Sealed proposal (CSP) process which allocates “points” based on a set of factors and allows an award to a bidder that isn’t the lowest bidder. That is reserved for building/vertical construction projects, non-construction projects etc.
This item was a sitework/horizontal construction project and it is lowest most responsive bidder and has no “points” involved. The bidder screwed up – he’s out. End of story.
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