elpasospeak

What’s going on with the city’s purchasing department?

We are seeing more and more recommendations from the department that all bids be rejected because of some universal failure on the part of all of the bidders.

The latest example is item 5 on the Tuesday, October 13, 2015 Sun Metro board meeting agenda.  The item is listed as:

Approve the request to reject all bids received for Solicitation No. 2015-981 (Bus Turbochargers) as recommended by the Purchasing and Strategic Sourcing Deparment and Mass Transit Department – Sun Metro. Bid submissions failed to furnish required OEM documentation.

Three bids were received and all supposedly failed to bid properly.  One would think that the people in the bus turbocharger business would be used to responding to government bids.

Could the problem be with the way the bid was written?  Is the city just fishing for pricing information?

More and more construction contractors are telling me that they don’t bid on city business anymore, partially because of the city’s history of taking bids, getting pricing, and rejecting all of the bids.

We deserve better

Brutus

We got this from Helen Marshall:

There has been a time-honored principle that a public figure must not only behave correctly but give no basis for suspicion (as supposedly the second wife of Julius Caesar did, leading to divorce!).  That clearly is so First Century BC here in El Paso.  

Something really good happened at city council at their Tuesday, October 6, 2015 meeting.

The district 8 city representative expressed her displeasure with the city manager and his staff.  She did not back down and ultimately council backed her.

Evidently the day before in council’s meeting with staff she had asked that staff present potential names for the cafe/grill that will be located in San Jacinto Plaza if that project is ever finished.  She wanted names that were creative and  historically relevant to El Paso.

When the issue came before council the next day, staff ignored her request.

She then explicitly directed her comments to the city manager.  She indicated that council was doing everything that it could do to have the plaza project completed as planned and that she did not want to leave details undefined thus causing delays (council cannot be as powerless as she claimed, the project is a disaster and she certainly has responsibility).

The city manager ultimately responded that they had a list of potential names.

Our city representative decided to ask that the item be postponed for a week and that she was tired of staff coming to council without details being codified and that she did not want to”leave certain details up to somebody’s discretion”.

The city manager and his staff wanted the lease to be approved right then and there.

The city clerk stepped in and told council that there was a motion and a second of the motion to postpone the item for one week and that further discussion before taking the vote was inappropriate.  They mayor agreed.

Then the city manager interrupted the vote and made his pitch to have the lease approved immediately.  He must feel that he has rights in the process that mere elected city representative do not have.

Our city representative then said “Mr. Gonzalez, with all due respect, this is a policy decision …” thus telling him to but out.

The beginning of the end

The city manager probably meant well here in that he wanted to avoid any kind of additional delay.  He should however have let council have control.  His ego needed to be put away.

The city representatives will now be more sensitized to the fact that they are having a power struggle with the city manager and city staff.  That struggle is one that he will lose.

Unfortunately our relatively new city manager form of government has resulted in a situation where city staff gets to exercise more control over issues than our elected officials do.

We saw council exerting it’s control in this case.

Thankfully I don’t need to close with my normal statement.

Brutus

The recommendation from city purchasing on this Sun Metro bid doesn’t make any sense at all.

Purchasing declared “RJ Border International, LP DBA Border International, as the lowest responsive, responsible bidder.”

Looking at the backup documentation we can see that the city compared bids from three companies for these five items:

The chart shows that for four of the items all three bidders came at about the same price with one bidder being the lowest on all four items.   The low bidder was not the one the city chose.

The fifth item shows something wrong.  Our formerly low bidder offered a price of $435.43 and the other two bidders offered $91.18 and $85.81.

The city used an old purchasing trick and added up the prices of each of the five items for each vendor.  The problem with that technique is that the city might buy different quantities of each item and treating each line item equally does not make economic sense.

Then again, bidders two and three might be aware that the city would not buy any of the fifth item and could safely bid a ridiculously low price.

The result is that the highest bidder will get the business in this case.

It is possible that bidder number one messed up.  That leaves bidder number three who got disqualified because they did not submit “the referenced price list”.

These things can happen but they seem to be happening often with our purchasing department.

We deserve better

Brutus