Skipper: BPS to go ahead with contract despite concerns
Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper said that the system will go ahead with its upcoming multi-million-dollar busing contract despite concerns raised by the state’s Inspector General over its bidding process.
“BPS transportation staff continues to work to finalize the contract for school bus transportation for the upcoming fiscal year,” Skipper said, adding that she anticipates presenting the contract at the March 1 Boston School Committee meeting. “Through the informed guidance of the Inspector General’s office, we have identified opportunities to clarify and improve contract administration that will be beneficial throughout the term of the contract.”
In her statement, Skipper appears to reference a letter sent to BPS by the state Office of the Inspector General, which was obtained by the Herald through a records request. The involvement of the OIG was requested after the city’s Finance Commission, a statutorily created city budget watchdog, found potential issues with the bidding process for the multi-million dollar contract in December, calling an experience requirement “arbitrary, artificially limited competition, and could increase costs to the taxpayers of the City of Boston.”
In that letter, Inspector General Jeff Shapiro shared concerns over the system’s bidding process for bus services and wrote that the Boston School Committee “and Boston Public Schools should understand that awarding such a contract at this time requires them to proceed at their own risk.”
As stated in the OIG letter, those concerns included the requirement that the contractor have “experience working with at least 3 school districts, transit agencies, or specialty districts with a fleet at least 50% of the size of the BPS fleet,” which appeared to be an arbitrarily high threshold that limited viable competition among contractors.
BPS has a fleet of 736 total buses, but uses 624 of them daily, according to the letter, which would make for a required system fleet experience floor of 312 buses. This means that not even Student Transportation of America, the nation’s third-largest operator, made the grade.
BPS quickly maintained they were “confident” in the process.
Despite four transportation contracting companies attending the mandatory walkthrough last September, only one company — the current contractor Transdev — submitted a bid, which totaled $17.5 million for for a five-year term, with an option for three one-year extensions. As the sole bid, despite the OIG letter’s concerns that not even it appeared to meet the requirement of servicing three systems with the necessary fleet size, Transdev was automatically awarded the contract.
The contract is set to take effect this fall.
The OIG did not make a determination about any violation of procurement law. The letter did note the city has legal discretion “to cancel a procurement if the governmental body determines it is in its best interest, if for instance, there are flaws in the process.”