elpasospeak

On city council’s agenda today we have another example of El Paso businesses being hurt when city staff could do better.

The item is number 10A on the consent agenda.  It proposes to award a construction contract for continuing work on Barker Road.

This item was on the agenda in September.  The city received five bids.  City staff wanted to award the bid to the second lowest bidder.  The lowest bidder evidently wanted more for “mobilization” than the city wanted to pay.

Mobilization is a bid item that allows the contractor to be paid early in the contract for costs related to setting up the contract.  Normally work is only paid for when completed.  Mobilization gives small local contractors a way to afford bidding on work by letting them recoup some of their out of pocket costs (like bonding) earlier.  Large contractors often can afford to carry those costs until the project is complete.  Without mobilization the smaller contractors might not be able to take on the work.

In the September item the low bidder asked for more than the 5% that the city will allow for mobilization.  The situation was somewhat ironic in that the same two first and second place bidders had seen a similar situation where this had come up.    In that case the city allowed the bidder with the mobilization cost over 5% to get the business.  In the September case city council asked that the project be rebid.  In both cases the bidders claimed that the overage was a clerical error.

Contractors are not allowed to make errors whereas the city seems to have a full time department producing Scrivener’s errors.

Of the five bidders being considered in September, two (including the low bidder) decided not to bid again.  Many contractors have told me that they don’t bid on city business because of what they perceive to be unfairness.

Since the September bids were made public, bidding again was different.  This week’s low bidder at $316,998.76 was September’s high bidder at $401,532.46.  The new low bid was just slightly under the September low bid.  This contractor obviously read the competitive information and decided to chop almost 25% off his bid.

The city could fix the mobilization problem with better bid language and by moving the mobilization computation down to the bottom of the bid form (sub total, mobilization, grand total) to make it easier for a bidder to check the number.

We deserve better

Brutus

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.

The airport has item 7 on the consent agenda at city council  this week.

The item proposes to award a sole-source contract for about $100,000 a year for three years to a company that will maintain software and equipment at the airport parking lot.

The backup material states “Mitchell Adding Machine DBA Mitchell Time and Parking is the sole source provider for Armano McGann software and revenue control equipment used to operate the Airport Parking Lot”.

State law allows sole-source purchases to be be done without bidding.

The truth

It took about 30 seconds to go to the Armano McGann web site and find this page  which shows dozens of dealers and distributors.

Does staff know the truth?  Are they deliberately facilitating a lie?

We deserve better

Brutus

The item that I wrote about in Principles or business, which will win? was postponed in yesterday’s city council meeting.

Today another blog wrote that the item had been awarded.  From what I can see of the city council video that is not correct.

It looks like the city is going to regroup on this item.

Stay tuned.

We deserve better

Brutus