Bidding process under fire over golf course grill
Current vendor claims winning proposal was lifted from his old bid; City Council set to review lease
For the past four years, Frank Gallegos and his family have operated the small but cozy restaurant at the city-owned Marty Sanchez Links de Santa Fe golf course off Caja del Rio Road.
When the city put the contract out to bid again late last year, Gallegos submitted another proposal to provide food and beverage service at the 18-hole golf course. He figured his experience, track record and what he called a good working relationship with the city and its employees would earn him another contract. He was wrong. An evaluation committee consisting of five city employees recommended awarding the contract to another vendor, who, as it turns out, submitted a proposal that is nearly identical to the bid that Gallegos turned in to get the job four years ago.
“We started noticing a lot of similarities — actually word for word, paragraphs and sentences,” Gallegos said Tuesday. “Under ‘sales strategy,’ they literally left my wife and our manager’s name in their proposal. Forget the plagiarism, they misrepresented and said my wife and our manager were going to work for them. That is the furthest thing from the truth.”
Ever Paz, a local chef and food truck vendor who submitted the winning bid on behalf of a business called El Sabor, did not return a message seeking comment.
But the apparent cribbing — and the evaluation process in general — has thrown the proposed contract into the air and raised questions about the city’s ability to evaluate bids.
Even one of the members of the evaluation committee wanted to distance himself from the process.
“Is it possible to remove my vote from the RFP,” or request for proposals, Brian Hodges, golf course superintendent, wrote in an email to Rob Carter, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department director, who was also a member of the committee.
“This is getting worse and worse every day,” Hodges wrote. “I can’t
even be on the golf course without getting questioned over the restaurant decision. … It has become political and I have no intentions on being a politician.” Carter flatly rejected Hodges’ request. “The decision stands and we need to stand by our decisions,” Carter responded.
The city, however, has been waffling on its decisions.
When the staff at the Municipal Recreation Complex went before the city Finance Committee to request approval of the new lease with El Sabor late last year, some councilors on the committee expressed concerns about the evaluation process.
Councilor Peter Ives said it was “somewhat curious” a new company could outscore an established restaurant based on such criteria as prior experience, company experience, pricing and “point-of-sale system knowledge.” Councilor Signe Lindell noted one of the five evaluators scored The Links Bar & Grill significantly lower than the others and said she was “very uncomfortable” with such an outlier.
Still, the committee voted to move the proposal forward to the full City Council for consideration.
In November, Gallegos filed a formal protest with the city, arguing that members of the evaluation committee had shown a clear bias in their scoring. El Sabor, doing business as El Sabor on the Links, received a total score of 2,085 while Gallegos’ The Links Bar & Grill received a much lower score of 1,670.
The city seemed willing to accept Gallegos’ protest and start anew.
“When the award was summarized and presented to the Finance Committee, proper procedures for presenting the results were not followed,” Shirley Rodriguez, the city’s interim purchasing officer, wrote to Gallegos. “As a result, the perception of bias and a non-convincing conclusion for the award require the Finance Department and Purchasing Office to run the process a second time. I will notify you when the RFP is available.”
In the meantime, Gallegos said he and the city agreed verbally to extend the existing contract for three months.
“I didn’t want the golf course to go without any services,” he said. “I mean, we’ve established a lot of friendships here at the golf course.”
Gallegos said he paid the city about $7,600 a year in rent, plus a percentage of the proceeds from events the restaurant hosted there.
As Gallegos prepared to submit another bid in anticipation of the city issuing another request for proposals, he obtained a copy of El Sabor’s winning proposal and immediately noticed the striking similarities to his original proposal.
“It is obvious they cut and pasted our entire RFP,” Gallegos wrote in an email to City Manager Brian Snyder.
Gallegos said he doesn’t know how El Sabor obtained a copy of his original proposal, but he contends it might involve a former Municipal Recreation Complex employee who had volunteered to look at his proposal four years ago and offer suggestions.
After Gallegos filed a protest, Paz, the winning bidder, appealed the city’s decision to issue another RFP.
The city sided with Paz, telling Gallegos in a letter his protest was granted “on what was thought to be a procedural misstep.”
Adam Johnson, the city’s finance director, said in an email Wednesday that the city did not base its decision to put out another bid on alleged bias but acknowledged that the proper procedure for presenting score totals was not followed.
The city “revisited” its decision after Paz objected, he said. He said the city recalibrated the scores by applying what is called the “local preference” to both bidders.
“The results of the recommendation from the evaluation committee did not materially change,” he wrote. “Further, all evaluation committee members signed the required disclosure that no conflict of interest interferes with their judgment in the procurement process.”
On Monday, city staff presented the proposed lease with El Sabor to the Finance Committee. The five-member committee was deadlocked, forcing Councilor Carmichael Dominguez, the committee chairman, to cast the tie-breaking vote.
“However anyone wants to connect the dots, the bottom line is we want a vendor that’s gonna serve the taxpayer the best they can,” said Dominguez, who voted to move the proposal forward only because he thinks it is “worthy of council discussion.”
“If we wanted to muddy the process a bit, this Finance Committee has done a very good job of that,” he said.
Gallegos said the whole process has been “just bizarre.” He acknowledged that the proposal he submitted last year didn’t contain the same level of detail as his first proposal.
“The proposal was just a standard proposal because they knew who we were, they know what we had done, zero complaints,” he said. “Why would you want to get rid of a good vendor?”