Ready, fire, aim

December 1, 2015

This is getting old.

The city is once again proving to be a menace to local businesses.

It should not be a surprise to anyone that we have been losing out on external funding of highway projects because our city staff cannot follow the funding rules.

Earlier in the summer we saw city council calling for heads to roll.  The proposed solution was to hire outside firms to manage the process for us.

The city issued a request for proposals to accomplish this in July.  Four local firms bid.  Now city staff wants to reject all of the bids.

Why?

As it turns out the specifications were incomplete.  Now that they have the four proposals and can evaluate the numbers they want to reject the bids and start over.

Item 14.1 on the Tuesday, December 1, 2015 council agenda reads:

Request rejection of all proposals received for Solicitation No. 2015-1142R (Management of Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Porgrams as recommended by the Purchasing & Strategic Sourcing Department and Capital Improvement Department, in order to incorporate new requirements to ensure TxDOT reimbursements are provided for federally funded projects.

Once again four businesses have spent money chasing city business only to have their proposals rejected because the city does not have it’s act together.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

3 Comments | City government, Purchasing | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Preferential treatment, an El Paso tradition

June 25, 2015

I was disappointed to read the article in the Times the other day about our former commanding general of Fort Bliss being accused of wrong-doing in a purchasing process.

We do not know what he did or did not do.  We do know that the Times, through reference to a Washington Post article, told us:

Pittard was not accused of financial gain but was reprimanded by the Army for his “excessive involvement” in awarding the $492,000 contract and for “creating a perception of preferential treatment,” the Post reports.

Further from the Times article:

An Army review board is also considering whether to strip Pittard of his rank as a two-star general before he is allowed to retire later this year, according to the story posted online Sunday.

Perception

We should compare that to what is going on in El Paso.  We have seen time and time again that not only is there a perception of preferential treatment, there is in fact preferential treatment.

The difference is that here in El Paso we tolerate it and whenever someone raises an objection the various local government officials circle the wagons to protect the culprits.  Vendors that file open records requests are considered to be the enemy.  Major contracts are cancelled and awarded to cronies.  The public loses.

We deserve better

Brutus

10 Comments | City government, County Government, El Paso Independent School District, El Paso Times, Purchasing | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Can we be that lucky?

June 23, 2015

Reading some city reports I learned about something new they have to offer called EP MarketPlace.

I pointed my web browser to it and was treated to  this:

epmarketplace

Wow!

The web page includes the statement:  “Changing the paradigm of how the City does business”.

Have they explained what they want to change?  The only thing I can see is that they don’t have a lot of locally owned businesses listed.

I think most of us would support changing the way the city does business however.

We deserve better

Brutus

Leave a Comment » | City government, Purchasing | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Hard to explain

March 25, 2015

This document:

casatrucks

was part of the backup material for a city council agenda item the other day.  The purchasing department was ranking various vendors for the purpose of deciding who to buy from.

I found the awarding of zero points in the category of “Reputation and Quality of the Bidder’s Service” to one of our oldest dealerships interesting.  Further down the page they have the category of “Past Performance” where the city gave the dealership a rating of 5, the highest value that could be given.

The dealership has a good reputation for service.  Their quality has been fine in the past.  Given that no organization is perfect I can see that the city might not have given them the maximum of 20 points on this item.  However the city gave them a zero, meaning to me that the city considers the dealer’s reputation and service quality to be horrible, non-existent, not worth considering.

The dealer offered one of the two lowest prices.  It is interesting to note that the other dealer with one of the lowest prices was also given a zero in the same category.

Could it be that city staff found the bidders prices to be inconvenient?  Would staff have had to give the business to someone that they might not like just because of price?  Did they use low ratings in the reputation and quality category just to knock out the two low bidders?

Also interesting is the “Vehicle Fuel Economy” category.  The dealership that the city has chosen to give the business to received the maximum 5 points that could be given here.  All of the other dealerships were given a zero.

How can that be?  It would seem to me that we would see some other numbers here.  Or is the city saying that the losing dealerships were offering vehicles that used an infinite amount of fuel?

We deserve better

Brutus

8 Comments | City government, Purchasing | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Texas waking up to problems with buy boards

May 15, 2014

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

 

2 Comments | City government, County Government, Purchasing, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »