Sprung Structure Was Sole-Sourced Jeff Leiper
“This isn’t sole-sourcing. It is a very short procurement. But again, when we’re addressing emergencies, the city needs to be nimble.”
Planning committee chairman and Kitchissippi Councillor Jeff Leiper
Now Leiper is telling us that it is not sole-sourced because the city has set up a short bidding competition for the project.
Leiper says local companies in a two-week period have enough time to submit bids. Building officials say the timeline is tight and that local companies believe the Toronto firm has already been earmarked for the deal.
Here is one thing we know for sure. Leiper doesn’t have the faintest idea how long it takes to make a formal proposal for a structure. If building officials say two weeks is tight, then it is tight. City hall is good at words, less so with actions.
This is what this whole process looks like.
The project was earmarked for a Toronto firm but when local contractors complained, the short bidding window was opened. Looks like it was sole-sourced but now the city is trying to cover its posterior by doing a short window procurement that local firms believe is just window-dressing.
Given the outcry about spring structures and the botched procurement, this sprung structure initiative has been botched from beginning to end … from public input to fouled procurement. It should have been easy. Due to municipal bungling, it has been hard.
Leiper says the city must be nimble to deal with an emergency. With Benn told about the sole-sourcing in early December, no doubt it was weeks before that a deal of some kind of deal was made. So let’s say November to late December to be city nimble. That’s nimble perhaps by municipal standard time but not the rest of society where deadlines are deadlines.
“This isn’t sole-sourcing,” Leiper says. Yes it is. When a Bulldog columnist is told in early December that it was sole-sourced, then it was sole-sourced. What’s in it for The Bulldog to publish a lie?
One thing certain … somebody is lying and it sure isn’t this publication.
Ken Gray
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This is called an advanced contract award notification. It is commonly used when the government believes there is no other possible company that could meet the specifications but it is going out just to make sure. They can be sued if they go sole source or if they fudge the specifications to make only one bidder eligible. It means a local company or several companies would have to spend the money to hire a lawyer to fight this. However if they do, this could delay the project as then they would have to create proper specifications and probably translate them which could take 6 months or more. Then they would have to run a competition which would probably last a month with evaluation of a month so if anyone challenges this they’re looking at around an 8 month delay before contract award. If they go ahead with it, then the procurement and work may be stopped for it to be resolicited and then you have another eight month delay.
C, to shorten your description of why, let’s call it what it is: circumventing due process.
The proper thing to have done would be to announce, in September or October, when they started to look for someone who could do the job, that they were doing just that. They could have shared then that they believed there was only one contender if that was the case. That would have given any other potential bidder the chance to say they wanted to put in a bid and had experience.
To come out with a half-hearted, semi-invitation to other contenders after stating they have their winner is so ridiculously and obviously biased and unfair. It takes money to put together any kind of serious proposal and most companies aren’t going to invest in a process where they’ve already been told there’s a favoured candidate.
I would be very interested to see any correspondence between the City and the ‘frontrunner’, particularly what the dates on that correspondence might be. It’s not an ’emergency’ in January if you’ve been dealing with it since last fall which I suspect is the case.
Aside from the fact that the process is wrong in this instance, if they get away with it, it will be repeated. They have to be held to account for this. Open and transparent it certainly isn’t.