2010-10-22 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

Home

MS. CRAWFORD: We are happy to spend as much time as you want on any of this, but we didn’t want to take up too long a time just with presentation, and so we tried to move through some pretty complex material very quickly. One last thing, I just wanted to mention is some of the things that we’ve already implemented to try and improve efficiency or save on costs within say the last couple of years, and that is like the construction bids and plans. So that’s like large plan documents and everything is now placed on cd’s and goes to the contractors in that form. So that replaced a lot of paper and the need even for deposits. So we’ve simplified that process. Under Procurement for Goods and Services, we’ve taken about 98% of the documents that used to be mailed out are now all sent electronically through email. Included in that is the Small Purchase quotes which are basically 100% emailed out and the responses come back in, it would an email or fax. And it’s just the small purchase under $25,000 that we’re still getting written quotations and it’s all being emailed out. All of the Notices for Goods and Services or construction contracts are posted on the state’s procurement notice site as opposed to newspaper advertising which we used to have. Long ago it was always in the Sunday paper, and then to cut costs we went to non-Sundays and now with the exception of some grant funded, Housing. And if they fall under certain federal regulations, they may still require posting in newspapers of general circulation. But the majority of what the county does, does not require that and so it’s done strictly on the website. That’s saving a lot of advertising costs. Beyond that I guess I would just say that we, I mean one thing, I’ll just mention it’s not a direct cost cutting effort, but we put effort in up front in the form of what Gilbert and Craig have talked about and the review of contracts through the process and requirements for documentation that ultimately we feel have resulted in this county in having very few procurement protests which are costly in time and energy for everyone. It can hold up a project or purchase of something, and we feel that investment in carefully getting information out to everybody, being very clear about what we need and want, and documenting what we’ve done helps protect the county in that way from those additional costs. And finally there are some other electronic procurement type activities that are under consideration but we’ve not taken much steps. So, with that I thank you and if there’s anything to add or we skipped over, we would welcome questions. MS. NICHOLSON: I’m sure we have some questions from some of our commission members, so anyone want to jump in and go first? MS. WONG: I’d just like a clarification of one of the terms that you used. I’m not clear of what that means. Procurement protest? Do you get protest for procurements? MR. MASUDA: What happens is for every procurement that’s sent out, any bidder, who is any person who submitted a bid and didn’t get selected, can file a protest. What the protest says is the way the specs came out wasn’t fair. It was geared too much towards my competitor, not toward me. Or the way you did the evaluation and you picked somebody else over me was somehow not fair or whatever. As soon as they file a protest, what’s built into the law is what’s called an automatic stay. So once he filed a protest, once Nancy receives, as a chief procurement officer, once she receives the protest, everything stops until the issue is resolved, or until there is a determination made that in the best interest of the government that the purchasing go through. But even that can, even in itself whether you try to do the override so to speak of the 7