Our local governments (particularly the city) have unfortunately been buying from buy boards instead of using competitive bidding.
Many of the buy board evaluations are little more than “beauty contests”. Competitive pricing is frequently a minor component in the evaluation criterion if at all. Some contracts are awarded because a seller offers X% discount off a manufacturer’s list price. The fact that another manufacturer may have a lower list price is not part of the consideration.
While buying through a buy board allows an institution to “pick their favorite vendor”, the purchase seldom produces the best economic result.
Market conditions change and issuing a real bid for a product or a request for proposals for a service often can provide better economic and performance results than buying from a buy board.
The problem with bidding is that local governments have to do their jobs and that is too often an inconvenience to them.
Here in El Paso much of the remodeling of the various city hall buildings was done through buy board purchases and was not bid. Schools in Houston benefited to the tune of 4% of the money that we spent since that was the fee that the buy board charged the vendor for the privilege of being listed on the board. This happened because the city did not want to take the time to develop specifications and take the projects out to bid. They were in a hurry to get out of the old city hall.
Turning around?
Now it seems that the Texas legislature is becoming aware of some of the problems with buy boards. This article talks about some of them, including the fact that vendors were allowed to write their own bid specifications.
For those readers that are new to this blog you can enter “buy board” in the search window on the right side of this page to see some of the articles that have been written about in the past.
They tell a story of waste, mismanagement, favoritism, and just plain unfairness.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Buy boards are effective when you are sourcing a list of supplies, equipment, standard catalog stuff and you know exactly what you want. They are less effective when you do not know, need a vendor’s help, or need the vendor to integrate and install components. That is when you need face to face contact with a vendor, not always easy under the city purchasing rules. I used both in my duty tour at the city.
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According to the Texas Insider article, the legislature is keying in on the roofing business of the Buy Boards. Hopefully they will evaluate the whole system since there appears to be more than just a roofing problem.
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