Find a way to keep sunshine on the RFP process
City Attorney Erin McSherry is right.
In contrast to how the City Council has considered the awarding of contracts for many, many years, the city’s procurement code has in the past, and still does mandate, that the contents of bidding companies’ proposals be kept confidential until after the City Council actually votes to award a contract.
But City Council Signe Lindell also is right.
“My concern is that when we get a bid, we aren’t going to have transparency on it, and I don’t think that anybody associated with this likes having less transparency,” she said.
Reluctantly, on McSherry’s advice, members of the council’s Finance Committee recently went into a closeddoor executive session to consider a couple of routine contracts— for water monitoring at landfills and engineering on water improvement projects — that had been put out for bids in competitive “requests for proposals” (RFPs).
In the past, the City Council has discussed contract bids publicly. And before a council vote to award a contract, there has been a chance for public discussion and public exposure at two or three committees meetings leading up to full council consideration.
Also, bid descriptions or documents have been included in agenda “packets” for the council and committee meetings. The packets have been considered public information, formerly were distributed to reporters in paper form and now are posted for public perusal on the city government website.
For instance, as of last week, the city website still was showing what appears to be the entire proposal to provide “speed vans” to monitor traffic on Santa Fe streets submitted by Verra Mobility of Arizona, the highest-rated bidder for providing camera enforcement of local speed limits.
A major example — before the council decided to stick with scandal-plagued Wells Fargo for city banking services two years ago, a detailed analysis comparing Wells Fargo’s proposal to bids from four New Mexico banks was made public.
Then there’s gophers, whose
eradication from city parks went out for contract last year. People legitimately wanted to know what method the prospective contractor was going to use to exterminate the critters.
McSherry, hired away from state government in June by Mayor Alan Webber to lead the city’s legal department, says we can expect that packet documents will no longer be made public ahead of the council awarding a contract.
Transparency can help. Last year, it came to light before a contract for food and beverage service at the city golf course was awarded that the bidder rated highest by an evaluation committee had, in its proposal, plagiarized information from the incumbent vendor.
But the city code says, “The contents of any proposal shall not be disclosed so as to be available to competing offereors during the negotiation process.”
Does this assertion make sense? It’s hard to understand how, after all bids have been submitted, evaluated and then a public recommendation is made for City Council action, making information on the bids public can somehow damage the process.
Is Bidder A going to come up with a better offer after the newspapers publish articles reporting that Bidder B has submitted a cheaper offer and is ranked as having the best proposal? That’s not how the RFP process is supposed to work.
McSherry has done the right thing by highlighting the discrepancies between the city procurement code and City Council practices. The solution now is for the council to change the code to ensure the kind of transparency the RFP process has had in the past.
City Councilor Chris Rivera said he would like to look into options and possibly go back to the old way of handling RFPs.
“The city has tried hard to make sure we’re being as transparent as possible and this, in my opinion, is a step back,” he said.
Rivera is right.