elpasospeak

This one is a surprise, even to me.

Item 15.2 on the Tuesday, April 19, 2016 city council agenda reads:

Discussion and action on the award of Solicitation No. 2016-513 Lease of Unmarked Police Vehicles to Acme Auto Leasing, LLC., for an initial term estimated award of $7,966,800.  The award is to include a two (2) year optional amount of $5,311,200 for a total five (5) year award of $13,278,000.

That works out to more than 2.6 million dollars a year for unmarked vehicles.  If you read the backup material you will see that they plan to get:

30 intermediate sedans, 2 door

30 intermediate sedans, 4 door

30 full size sedans, 4 door

30 full size pickups, 2 wheel drive, extended cab

30 full size pickups, 2 wheel drive, crew cab

30 full size pickups, 4 wheel drive, extended cab

30 full size pickups, 4 wheel drive, crew cab

10 passenger vans, mini

10 passenger vans, full size

That comes to 230 vehicles.  According to their 2014 annual report the police department had 1,017 officers.

The money to pay for the vehicles appears to be coming from external grants.  Other than about half a million dollars a year worth of confiscated funds that could be spent on something else, none of the money appears to be coming from our local pockets.  Instead the money seems to be coming from our federal pockets.

I wonder who will pay for the gasoline?

Hopefully they won’t have Connecticut plates.

We deserve better

Brutus

The Times published two articles in their Saturday, March 2, 2016 edition about the mess at the city’s purchasing department.

In the first the Times points out that city staff wants to cancel a request for qualifications  for services to manage the construction of their quality of life projects.  Once again the city has asked companies to spend significant amounts in the hope of getting business only to have the city cancel the process once it has the vendor’s financial numbers.  You can read the whole article here.

I suspect that the winner here would not have been who the city wanted and so cancelling the bid is a way to regroup and bring the issue back up when they think that we have forgotten.

Some potential bidders will not even respond to a city request for bids because they feel their chances of winning good business are nill.

In another article, “Questions surface over city engineering bid” the Times points out that in 2014 the city conducted an accelerated bid process for engineering services that was cancelled after their presumed favorite was not the best choice.

The city’s procurement process is often not fair.  It is often rigged in such a manner as to make their choice of vendor the winner.  They use different tricks but the result is frequently the same, either their choice of vendor wins or they cancel the bid.

We’ll write more about the specific tricks they use in future posts.

We deserve better

Brutus

The Tuesday, February 22, 2016 city council agenda had a purchasing item on it that is both bad business and bad public policy.

The airport wants to have a software program designed for it to help with managing its various contracts.

The airport and purchasing departments are recommending the award of a five year contract with two five year extensions.  Fifteen years is a long time.

Also significant is that no local companies even bothered to bid.  We have good software firms here in town but it looks like they know better than to do business with the city.

We deserve better

Brutus

David K. over at Refuse the Juice posted this the other day:

Explain this to me

Thirty people lost their jobs a week before Christmas to an out of town company that offered worse performance than the local incumbent.

We deserve better

Brutus

The Tuesday, December 31, 2015 city council has an item on it that shows us what the community thinks of doing business with the city.

According to the backup material for agenda item 18.1 the city leases between 350 and 400 copiers.  A request for proposals was issued and four vendors responded.

If the city exercises the two one-year extensions tied to this three year contract, the vendor will be paid around $2.3 million dollars.

Four bidders responded.

Why is it that the tabulation sheet only rates one bidder–the one that they want to award the business to?

Were the specifications made restrictive so that the vendor the city wants to do business with was the only one that could qualify?

What was wrong with the other three vendors that they were not even evaluated?

We deserve better

Brutus