elpasospeak

Texas law prohibits competitive bidding for professional services rendered to  governments.  It instead requires the agencies to make a selection ” (1) on the basis of demonstrated competence and qualifications to perform the services; and (2) for a fair and reasonable price”.

Professional services include architecture, professional engineering, accounting, legal, real estate appraising and a host of other disciplines that are generally under a state licensing board like the Texas Appraiser Licensing and Certification Board.

This is unusual in that businesses choose professional services frequently based upon the price to be charged.  Being competent is part of the process.  Under the state system, however,  the agencies conduct a “beauty contest”.  They generally issue a Request for Qualifications first.  Interested individuals and firms respond to the request.  The agency then generally has a committee rank the candidates.  The rankings must by necessity be subjective, in other words “who looks best”.

This leads to mischief.  The committees frequently pick their favorites since disproving a subjective judgement is so difficult and they can thus get away with favoritism.

Lets look at the process at the City of El Paso.  Some professionals will not bid city jobs because they know from prior experience that they will not be chosen and that submitting a response would be a waste of time.  This item on the October 30, 2012 city council agenda is particularly troubling.

Here the city states that their “On-Call” agreements with various consulting firms will expire and that they need to issue new ones.  Instead of waiting for a specific project to create a need for consulting services the city wants to pre-approve a bunch of different firms (43 to be precise) for various kinds of work.  The city evidently issued requests, picked their favorites and now wants to issue contracts.

The way it works out:

• The firms were not selected for their specific capabilities for an individual project.  Let’s say that the city wants to build a new major league swimming facility.  They did not issue a Request for Qualifications that centered on the firm’s ability to design or engineer a swimming facility.  Instead the firms were judged generally (whatever that means).
• In most categories the ranking committees select about half of the candidates to be worthy
• The other half are banished
• Contracts are awarded for $500,000 to each selected firm.  The firms are not given specific jobs to do,  just be “on-call”.  Who knows how much work the city will actually require at this point?  They just want to be able to pick and choose the firms when the need for work comes up.
• Some firms actually have work assigned to them and some of them don’t.  The amount of work they get will depend upon how well they get along with the city staff.  Don’t ever, ever, ever disagree professionally with city staff.  After all, they control the money and you are just an expert on the subject.
• Feedback to city council is minimized because the firms that are awarded contracts but not given any actual work keep their mouths shut when a deal is awarded to someone else.  They have hope that if they “go along” they will eventually get some work.
• The net effect is that the city staff has great control over the professionals and the professionals need to be quiet about what is happening if they want any city work.

Maybe by and large this leads to fairness.  No.  Consider these circumstances:

• A firm submitted a response  for architectural services and was ranked 14th out of 18.  That is not very good.  The city selected the top 9 (see page 4 of the presentation).  The firm did not get a contract.  Evidently the city thought that their work was not as good as it needed to be.
  
• Less than a month later the city needed architectural services to rehabilitate the Luther building as part of the move out of city hall.  The firm that was ranked 14th got the contract for $562,316.   Why?  Because previously a private owner ran its own selection process and chose the firm to do work on the building and thus the firm was the best qualified according to the city.
• Hold it!  Not good enough — then good enough.  Baloney!  Not my favorite — but need to use them anyway — is what this looks like.

I don’t know anyone at the firm in question and they do not know that I am writing this.  I just have to wonder how they can be so undesirable to the city and still be good enough to handle a project for one of the most able businessmen in El Paso.  I have to conclude that they are just fine and that their only problem with the city is that they have not become one of the chosen few.

There may however be an element of truth in the process.  The city refers to on-call professionals.  The world’s oldest profession uses that designation also if I am not mistaken.

We deserve better.

They really are creative.  Someone I know says “Once you have abandoned your principles the rest is easy”.

Remember that in Sneak Attack I wondered what was happening with the $450,000 the contractor quoted to demolish the old offices in the El Paso Times building.  City council was going to consider almost $649 thousand to build new offices for the mayor, council and the city attorneys, but was not considering the $450 thousand.

I pointed out that Texas law required council to approve the $649 thousand since it was over the $500 thousand threshold that the legislature set for automatic review with this type of contract.

Well, listening to the council meeting today I heard  the question asked and answered.

City staff evidently felt that since the $450 thousand was below the state requirement staff could proceed without council approval.

The reality is that this should have been a single contract.  The contractor is going to tear down some old offices and build new ones where the old ones were.  It would have added up to $1,099,000 but staff could get this started easier by breaking it into two separate pieces.  State law forbids this kind of sequential purchasing under some purchasing methods, but not under the one used here.

In any event rack up another $44 thousand that the Houston based Harris County Department of Education gets since the contractor must pay 4% of it’s booty to them.  That is money that could have stayed in El Paso.

O shame, where is thy blush?  (Who would have known that Hamlet knew the people at the city?)

We deserve better