Like everyone that reads this blog, every Friday I get excited reading all the agenda supporting documents for the upcoming Monday Lake County School District Board meeting. I know you, just like I, sit down with your coffee and enthusiastically read all the supporting documents, which are NOW available in the new "Board Docs" software system HERE.
While digging through the supporting documents for procurements, I found an agenda item related to a requested approval of a purchasing contract for lubrication "motor oils and fluids" for fleet maintenance, etc.
Even though the procurement dept. received 10 bids, they also had a process to receive comments on the bid process, and after reading them, requested the Board to REJECT the current bids so they could rewrite the bid request based upon comments to be more flexible and possible reduce costs even more. That is amazing...
- listening to comments from vendors to improve the procurement and enable more competition, rather than restrict it.
In contrast, over at the separate Lake County Board operations:
- They purchased a $32-million radio system about 2+ years ago without even obtaining a competing bid to ensure price competition.
- Just this last week the County Board was confronted with a dispute about paying $600,000 in change orders to an architect because the contract was vague and not clear about how to process change orders. ( In my opinion...)
Kudos to the School District procurement department for moving to clarify bid wording based upon vendor feedback.
vj
Due to improved transparency of School District Board documents, here is the explanation of the issue directly from the supporting document for the upcoming Apr. 12 Board meeting - this was written by the School District Procurement Manager:
The need for motor oils and fluids for this District is reviewed on an annual basis. Due to the anticipated volume a competitive sealed bid was issued. Bid announcements were sent to 167 prospective bidders and ten (10) companies’ submitted their proposals for consideration. A legal advertisement was published in the Florida Bid Reporting Service during the week of February 15, 2010, the Daily Commercial on February 12, 2010, and was also posted on the Lake County Schools Purchasing website. All of the bid proposals received are available for viewing in the Purchasing Department.
The recommendation being presented to the Board is to reject all bids received from this solicitation at this time and staff will reissue the bid as soon as possible providing more clarity for the bidders. It has been determined that we did not provide enough information as to our specific needs and were too restrictive in how we requested the products to be packaged and delivered. The department provided quantity information and pricing requests based on how they presently receive their items. Upon reading some of the comments and reviewing the bids received we have determined that, although unintentional, this may have contributed to some confusion for the proposing vendors in not knowing how to present their products to meet our requirements. The attached sheet demonstrates the variety of responses received in an attempt by the proposers to meet the packaging requirements of the bid. It was also discovered after bids were received that the department could accept deliveries in a less restrictive manner than what had been requested, which should allow for the District to receive additional bids when the bid is reissued.
Rejection of all bids received is, in the opinion of the Purchasing Department, the only viable option for the District in terms of doing what is fiscally most prudent, as well as maintaining the integrity of open and fair competition for the vendors. We are also investigating the possibility of combining our requirements with other entities in a POOL (Purchasing Officials of Lake County) consortium bid.
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