2010-10-22 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS. NICHOLSON: And if you only get one bid or no bids, what happens? I mean there was obviously a flaw in the system somewhere to not get anybody who is interested in bidding at that estimated cost level. MS. CRAWFORD: I would say they’re not locked in to that estimated cost at all. That’s given to them. But they’re going to develop their bid. It’s not necessarily a flaw. If we’re talking about construction, say during boom times, contractors are busy. We’re not the easiest clients to deal with. We have a lot of regulations. So you may get one or no bidders on a project not because there’s anything wrong. They could pick whatever they wanted if it was unreasonably high. Because that’s the only reason they could do it, then we wouldn’t necessarily accept that bid. MS. NICHOLSON: And do all contractors have to pay Davis Bacon wages? I’m getting yeses and noes. MR. MASUDA: All contractors that deal with government agencies have to. MS. NICHOLSON: But for county, strictly a county project. MR. MASUDA: Yeah, we’re a government agency. So, yes. Everybody who deals with the county, they have to. That’s how come your question of why sometimes there’s no bids, it’s because there is more money to be made outside, not taking government contracts and they don’t have to pay Davis Bacon wages for those other contracts. MS. O’HARA: My question relates to the drafting of RFPs and to some extent IFBs. In that process it has to initiate from each department in services that they need and what not. What is the handholding between Purchasing Division and the departments as they try to draft these Requests for Proposals or Invitation to Bids, to help reduce the amount of time, often the services were needed yesterday, the departments decide they need the services, they sit down to draft this RFP, the process alone once it’s published takes 60, 90, 120 days to end up in contract. So this process the departments go through drafting their documents can sometimes take so long that by the time it actually gets out on the street it’s changing. MR. BENEVIDES: That can occur, but with about 99% of the purchases we make for any service or any goods, it’s been done already. So we go back, we look at one of our older bids, to start the process off with. We’re not reinventing the wheel each time. Or if it’s a really complex issue that we haven’t worked on before we’ll check with the other jurisdictions to see if they have, and get a copy of their bids. This is at the beginning of the process. We define as much information we can in whole or in part that we can then start the process with. As far as working between Purchasing and the departments it’s a very close relationship in that they put their, essentially they call us, they say, after we get the requisition, they call us and say, this is what we need. So we go search the data banks to see if there’s something that’s similar to, if not exactly the same as they’re requesting. We’ll send it to them for them to review. They’ll start the process there. They’ll send it back to us for us to review or a lot of the times it’s face to face. And we patch it out. Unless there’s some other problem in determining if they want to forward with the project at all, I don’t see it getting hanged up very often at all by putting the RFP or the bid spec together per se precisely because we’re not usually starting from 20