Contractors who do shoddy work risk city blacklist

Starting next month, contractors who have done shoddy work for Montreal can be barred from getting future city contracts.

“If you have a contractor that has done a bad job installing a bathroom in your house, you don’t hire that contractor again,” said Dimitrios Jim Beis, the executive committee member in charge of public contracts. “The city didn’t have this power.”

On Wednesday, the city’s executive committee approved an evaluation process that all contractors will be subject to, whether they are doing construction work, providing a service or delivering a good to the city with a value greater than $100,000. The evaluation process will be put to city council for approval at its September meeting, and could be passed as early as next month.

“This program will have a deterrent effect on contractors, because losing a contract from the city of Montreal can have dire consequences,” said Lionel Perez, the city’s executive committee member in charge of infrastructure.

The evaluation process was the fruit of nearly two years of work by city employees, after the Quebec government changed its laws in June 2013 governing the awarding of public contracts to allow the creation of a black list of contractors. Prior to this process, the city was obliged by law to award contracts to the lowest bidders, even if it had a bad experience with a contractor.

After a contract has ended, the appropriate division heads will conduct an evaluation and write up a report card with a score out of 100.

The report card will be used to help the city determine whether to put the contractors in question on a black list that will be made public. The evaluation report will also be made public.

If a company gets a grade of less than 70 per cent, it will be notified within 60 days, and then have 30 days to appeal the decision and provide an explanation, such as if city employees were negligent in their duties. City bureaucrats then have 60 days to decide whether to change the evaluation. After that, it will be up to the city’s executive committee to decide whether to blacklist the company.

If the company is put on the list, it will stay there for a period of two years. However, that doesn’t mean the company won’t be able to obtain contracts from the city in the meantime. It will be up to individual borough and city councils, and the executive committee whether to award a contract to a company that has been flagged. Perez said this latitude exists because if a company on the list has received high marks in past reports but only faltered once, it may not make sense to bar such a company from future contracts.

Perez said the process will allow companies in question to have recourse if they want to contest a decision. He said he believes this will also help avoid lawsuits from companies that have been barred, because courts tend to uphold decisions made by cities if there is strict evaluation criteria in place.

The city will not have one person in charge of coming up with all the reports; rather, individual division heads will be trained so that the evaluation process is uniform.

Émilie Thuillier, the leader in city council of the opposition Projet Montréal, said she’s impressed with the city’s evaluation process, but said it took too long to come to fruition.

“We gave the city services a mandate to do this on an accelerated timetable two years ago,” Thuillier said.

She added she’s concerned the city does not have enough staff to handle such an evaluation process. The city awards about 1,000 contracts of $100,000 or more every year, so that’s a lot of reports to write, Thuillier observed.

“People need to have the time to do their work (properly),” Thuillier said.