2010-10-22 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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scratch. We don’t reinvent the wheel every time. If we have to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch, obviously it’s going to take a little longer. MS. O’HARA: On that same note, the county has in the past, cancelled RFPs and IFBs that have been out to bid which companies have reacted to, responded to, and the county then cancels them. Is there some way to prevent that from happening? Because that’s not another discouragement to the planning sector to bid on. MR. BENEVIDES: Sure. And that’s always part of the thought process in going in. It’s to make sure that the need is there. Most of the time the need is there or the using agency wouldn’t be requesting it in the first place. But if there’s any reticent on that side, we’re having meetings with them. If there seems to be any real problem about making the award, we’ll discuss that. Hey, if you guys aren’t really thinking seriously about making this award, let’s not put it out. I have not come across really that problem as a major problem. And the cancellations of bids that you hear about comparatively speaking to the overall bids that are put out, very small. But we do not like when it happens, obviously. So we’re always trying to prevent that. And every bid that we put out, the intention is to make the award. But for some reason or other, we may not be able to. But them sometimes it goes back to the law, the way the specifications were written. We don’t have enough time. Or it’s too complex to address as an addendum to the bid. So we would cancel the bid and start all over. There are instances like that that precipitate the cancelling of the bid every once and a while. MS. O’HARA: Thank you Gilbert. Another thing, we had a presentation by the Green Team. Alex Frost came in to one of our meetings and in recognition of that, how much work is Purchasing doing to try and include green pricing phraseology in your contracts, be it fuel, or vehicles or whatever? Are we working to get those types of language into our request for proposals and bids? I know the other counties are doing so. MR. BENEVIDES: That’s more of a policy issue. If the county decides that that’s the policy and that’s the way they would want us to write the specs to include that, then that’s the way we would write it. So I would just leave that answer to Nancy. MS. CRAWFORD: At this point we have not focused a lot of energy on making sure that we’ve got green language in our contracts. And that’s not to say we’re not open to that at all. It’s just that’s not something we focused a lot of attention on up to this point, I can imagine, certainly there are in certain construction jobs that’s, I’m not speaking of construction jobs right now, if you were talking more, I thought you were, I was thinking of other kinds of contracts that we could certainly be looking into. In construction there will be a number of things, and what we’re doing is energy efficiency projects. MS. O’HARA: That’s great to hear. MR. BENEVIDES: And just as an aside, all of our paper will be, we applied a preference for recycle stuff. MS. O’HARA: My last question is I guess, well Jodie described the process and then once the contract’s in place, you get the certified payrolls and invoices from the contractors. How do we, as a county, document the work that we’ve contracted for is 21