THE CITY - The City Council found itself immersed again in messy contract argument. This one was whether or not to grant a non-competitive contract to a firm that would provide free Wi-Fi service at LAX.
Airport management’s argument was that it unexpectedly lost its current provider, and it didn’t want to leave travelers without any service during the two years it would take to find a provider using standard competitive bidding procedures.
Therein we find a fundamental shortcoming of city government. It seems to always find ways to make things unnecessarily complicated and costly.
City Hall’s focus is usually on getting the immediate problem off its plate as quickly as possible, and rarely on how to correct flaws in the system that will give rise to another controversy.
Even if it requires an amendment to the City Charter, the city should want the ability to take all the qualified bidders for a service or product, and let them bid against each other until there is a winner.
This would take the politics and corruption out of the process, and produce more revenue or less cost for the City.
As it is now, City staff designs the bid requirements and evaluates the submissions. They rank the bidders and eliminate those who don’t meet the city’s minimums.
Then it gets ugly.
The losers hire lobbyists to demean the winner, and sometimes even the city staff. The goal is often to get the commission or City Council to throw out all the bids and start over. The tactics can include personal attacks and everything we dislike about political campaigns.
Because so many qualified bidders don’t want the headaches that come with doing business with the City, it’s highly unlikely that the taxpayers ever end up with the best possible deal.
Recommendations to reform the City’s contracting system would seem to be the kind of thing you would expect to come from the City’s Quality and Productivity Commission, but I don’t recall it ever proposing any changes dealing with improving quality or productivity.
The 14 members of the commission are an impressive lot … leaders from the business, labor, and non-profit communities. Between their experiences and those of their friends and colleagues I’m certain that they could generate enough ideas to keep the mayor and city council members busy for a long time.
The City Council is quick to put City Charter amendments on the ballot at the request of special interest groups, so it would be interesting to see what they would do when presented with some good government measures.
Several of the commission members are active neighborhood council members, so increasing the productivity of the Productivity Commission should be a goal of the councils.
The only apparent opposition to a ballot measure that improves the contracting system would come from the lobbyists who make a nice living off controversy and confusion.
(Greg Nelson is a former general manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, was instrumental in the creation of the LA Neighborhood Council System, served as chief of staff for former LA City Councilman Joel Wachs … and occasionally writes for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) Graphic credit: banbillboardblight.org
–cw
Tags: Greg Nelson, LAX Wi-Fi, City Charter, Quality and Productivity Commission, bidding, City Hall, Los Angeles
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 52
Pub: June 29, 2012