| 1) Why were so few bids returned on such an important project? Again, Kedron provides some great information about this question in the comments to the other post. I wanted to summarize his points: - City tried to do this in-house, but realized the project was too big
- Over the summer, both heads of the coordinating departments were fired
- "The first attempts to RFP" received no qualified bidders
- In November, they tweaked the requirements to get some bidders -- which netted the three they received
So, first and foremost, let's dispell with the myth -- proposed by Omar Gallaga, who mixed a valiant effort to collect the facts with a horrendous attack on the people who wanted to raise issue with the project -- that the City of Austin isn't to blame. Gallaga wrote:
Why rail about it after the fact? Somebody dropped the ball. And it’s not clear that it was the city.[snip] If you don’t step up to the plate, you don’t get to complain that you didn’t hit a home run. Rally if you like. Storm tomorrow’s City Council. Get all up in that Facebook group and decry the continued Californication of Austin. Sign a vague Twitter petition. But unless you are willing to look at the factors at work and see what the city has to work with, you might want to run to the drugstore and quickly dose yourself with a heaping tablespoon of Shut Up and Calm Down (available without a prescription). Gallaga's argument placed blame squarely on the companies, creating a huge wall of defense (he later announced the vote delay with the flippant, "Yay, Austin?") for the City of Austin. In doing so, he missed the opportunity to make a much better and more appropriate analysis: Austinites and Austin City Council members and staff need to be more engaged in the process. If the search for this was begun years ago, and then basically had to completely restart last November, then the City of Austin is clearly having troubles in their RFP process. At the same time, companies shouldn't wait for "torpedos fire!" mode to engage the citizenry about an issue like this. So to answer Gallaga's question: Would it be heresy for me to suggest that if an Austin company wasn’t able to put in a competitive bid and that the city only had three bids to work with and is choosing the one that’s most cost-effective for them, that maybe Austin deserves to lose that business?
Yes. Yes it is heresy -- because he's placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of companies and forgiven the City of Austin for an RFP process they left to die then, realizing its horrendous nature, resurrected just a few months ago. There's plenty of blame to go around. Let's not become apologists for those whose jobs it is to govern. If bloggers and twitterers become "irked" it's because we -- I guess foolishly -- still have some faith that we can live our lives and focus on our own jobs and trust that the City will get the job done right. When it doesn't get done right -- and I don't think anyone thinks this project has been handled right, which is why the city is bringing in new people to examine the process -- I think it's entirely acceptable for a citzenry that is engaged (even if it's late, because there is no timeline on when we can talk to our City Council) to get irked, get mad, and demand something better. If others want to tell us to "Shut Up and Calm Down," by all means. I love frisbee golf, too, Omar -- I played every course in the city one day, over 100 holes from 6am to 8pm -- but I also am going to act when I think something isn't being done right. 2) Should the city support paying an additional $600k (though that could, with any common sense of the two parties, easily be negotiated/structured downwards) for a local provider for the same work? My response is: yes. Here's why.
As I argued yesterday, if most of the funding is going to come out of existing groups that make the city money, then we're really not passing anything along to taxpayers at all. Therefore, the decision that has to be made when evaluating bids is, "how much do we value local business, and how does that weigh against procuring a contract at a low cost?" My main points are: - We have failed to label this contract as a "tax incentive" -- which normally is the term used to justify favoritism across any number of other business. If this were a "tax incentive" then it would be much more politically palpable to spend the extra dollars on a local company.
- An RFP process that begins by requiring a bond is flawed from the outset. I'm all for creating a smart capital investment plan on projects...but the default shouldn't be, "let's 100%, at all costs, protect the budget." I'm sorry, that's just not what I believe -- but I know others disagree about that. Which side you fall down on, to me, determines what kind of a leader you are.
- This isn't about "Keep Austin Weird." It's about acknowledging that the tech sector in Austin is, along with state government, music, and Barton Springs, part of the core identity of the city. Anyone that spent any time at the SXSW Interactive Technology Conference last weekend understands that point.
The creation/design of an RFP process begins with a set of perspectives and assumptions. If those perspectives/assumptions begin with, "let us figure out how we can make the best process that will allow us to use local businesses" then we can solicit cost-competitive contracts for that. But if the perspectives/assumptions from the outset of any time of contracting process are defined as, "we want to make everyone happy -- we want to save money and maybe try to use local contacts, but let's also do this and this and then, wait, we have to redo this and now it's been a year and we haven't gotten any bids oh crap let's see what we can change oh no we only got 3 bids well whatever let's just get this over with because I'm tired of working on this".... Well, that's not leadership. That's looking for a technical solution to an adaptive challenge. I'm curious to see what happens with the delay. Is the City of Austin going to use the new communications director and chief information officer to really get at the heart of the problem? Or will the new attention just lead to everyone trying to pull wool over everyone's eyes, so that everyone can "Shut Up and Calm Down" so the Council can re-focus on their elections and stop worrying about this bothersome thing called "governance." I'll be sure to right about it once I've learned more... |
