City's single-source bill hits $4.4M

Purchases without competition in 2020 blamed on `special' year

T-shirts, respirators and marketing services were part of the $4.4 million in sole-source spending that city hall chalked up to “special circumstance” in 2020, with several expenses driven by the COVID-19 public health crisis.

The city on Monday wasn't able to differentiate the pandemicrelated expenses from others, but documents listing purchase orders for 2020 include items related to health services, protective equipment and logistics. The city has released a report of procurement activities from the year in advance of finance committee and council meetings in September.

The City of Ottawa declared a state of emergency on March 25, 2020, because of COVID-19, allowing the municipal bureaucracy to be more nimble in purchasing goods and services.

The city has a procurement bylaw that aims to achieve the best value in purchases by the municipal government. A principle of the bylaw is having transparent and competitive purchases.

However, the bylaw provides several exceptions that allow management to go directly to one source for a purchase without holding a competition.

For example, if a company is the only one that offers the good or service the city needs, there doesn't have to be a competition.

Spending under special circumstances, in general, isn't unique for city hall since there are times when it needs to react quickly, such as making emergency repairs to infrastructure.

In 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 gave the city another reason to forgo contract competitions.

The special-circumstance exception includes any threats to public health, safety or welfare; a response to the global pandemic would apply.

The city listed 16 times in 2020 when staff used the special-circumstances clause to buy goods or services from companies, rather than having competitions, for purchases costing more than $25,000.

Will McDonald, the city's chief procurement officer, said some of the special circumstances listed in a 2020 procurement yearin-review weren't related to the COVID -19 state of emergency.

“The purchases in the report were processed through each department's authority delegated to them by the procurement bylaw to purchase the goods, services and construction considered necessary to remedy a special circumstance without regard to the requirement for a bid solicitation. As such, a detailed, city-wide breakdown of the process and reasoning for each purchase is not currently available,” McDonald said in an email relayed by the communications department.

Included in the purchases for special circumstances was $1.7 million for the supply and delivery of personal protective equipment for the emergency operations centre in the second half of 2020.

The city manager's office paid $101,760 for professional services to help with “participating and collaborating within the Big City Virtual Hub and support in managing and tracking the city's emergency response to the crisis.”

The city used the non-competition procurement power to buy $200,354 in services from a local advertising agency for an “economic recovery campaign” under the economic development branch.

There were several special-circumstance purchase orders tied to needs of the Ottawa Paramedic Service, including gas masks and air canisters, respirator gear, disinfectant lights, and sterilization cabinets for disinfecting medial equipment. A $1-million purchase order was for 3M respirator equipment.

The city also acquired 4,058 dry-wicking T-shirts for the paramedic service for $103,152, but the procurement entry doesn't say if the sole-source purchase was directly tied to the COVID-19 response.

COVID-19 was a quickly emerging emergency situation in early 2020, but the city at the time was also on alert for the potential of seasonal flooding along the Ottawa River. The city used the special-circumstance provision to stock up on sandbags for the 2020 and 2021 spring freshet, spending $356,160 on a sole-source procurement.

The city lifted the state of emergency related to COVID -19 on July 22. Management has indicated it will ask council's permission to release city hall's purchasing information for 2021 by the end of June 2022.