2010-10-22 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS. O’HARA: So Gilbert, this is all tracked electronically, isn’t it, the contracts and the supplemental contracts, etc.? MR. BENEVIDES: Well they’re in the system electronically. But we send the paper around for signatures because it’s gotta be the original signatures. MS. O’HARA: Right, I understand. I’m not trying to pinpoint. I happen to work for a company that has a small contract with the county, that had the supplemental years, where supplemental contracts weren’t forthcoming. They appeared a year late. So, I’m just kind of curious, is there something that could be improved in your electronic system that might be a MR. BENEVIDES: Well, in place now, I see what you’re getting at, about four months prior to the contract coming to expiration, if there are option years, we send what we call a green sheet notification to the using agency saying this thing is coming up. You guys tell us if you want to rebid, do the option year or if you don’t need the services any longer. We constantly stay on top of that. We have our contracts clerk who stays on top of that, and she gets electronic beeps everyday as to what’s coming up, what’s still out there. We call the using agencies. We ask them, we didn’t get this back yet, so we can’t go forward with doing an addendum or a rebid. Sometimes it’s because the using agency is still deciding if they want it or if they need some changes. And sometimes it leads to going out quite late, but it’s not because we haven’t sent it out. It’s because the decision to go forward has not been made yet. MS. O’HARA: The key word there was the green sheet. When we’re still relying on colored paper to track things it tells me that we could be doing things perhaps more efficiently electronically. So, I guess something to look at because that system has caused problems for contractor in the past and I know as a contractor we were affected by it too. MR. BENEVIDES: To augment the green sheet, we do at the same time send out emails to tell them that it is coming and to please respond as quickly as possible. And the contract clerk then puts a three day higher suspense date one it so that she gets prompted again in three days if it hasn’t come back to contact the using agency again either by email or sometimes we find more effectively, a phone call. MS. O’HARA: Just wondering if there was some contract routing on line that departments could directly go into and access to determine whether or not the contract is moving, if it needs the supplemental you know, what things are, cause sometimes it’s difficult to get that information down to the person in the department who’s actually managing the contract cause it may not be the department head. MR. BENEVIDES: I go back to what I said a little earlier where we field calls all day and a lot of those calls are finding out what the status is on contracts. And so we’ll bring everybody up to date. Sometimes we have to track down if it’s still at the using agency or Corp Counsel, the Mayor’s Office. So there is constant contact trying to track those. Unfortunately sometimes some, for whatever reason, gets caught in this or that, and it takes a while to get them completely. 24