Should County Governments establish an ordinance giving first preference to local businesses?
INTRODUCTION: This forum subject is offered as a topic for discussion to determine if people think creating a County ordinance giving preference to local businesses in the competitive bidding process is an important issue.
BACKGROUND: County Departments frequently buy products and services from vendors who respond to RFPs (Requests for Proposals) and, in certain cases and for numerous reasons, vendors awarded the County contracts are not always locally based.
In a recent conversation I had with someone who is not a vendor, it was suggested that Local 20/20 consider approaching the County Commissioners to see if an ordinance should be created that gives preference to those businesses who are primarily located within our County AND who meet the requirements of any RFP, even if their bid is slightly higher than an outside vendor's.
In discussing this issue, the question involves whether this is seen as an important enough issue to pursue?
If it is determined important to pursue, interested persons and alliances need to attend County Commission meetings and voice their concerns for such an ordinance.
From my perspective, money spent within our county will, for the most part, likely remain within the county. Therefore, even if a local bid is somewhat higher than an outside vendor's bid, the benefits of keeping those funds local, especially if we are talking about substantial monies, far outweigh the fact that they are higher.
Respectfully,
Steve Hamm
Coordinator HUB
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May 25th, 2006
Incorporate costs of non-local vendors
If the proposal to the county can be put together in a way so that they can apply a formula that would avoid arbitrary or subjectively based favoritism by providing an objective method for giving solid reasonable cost evaluations for vendor selection that happen to give the most local qualified vendors a fair competitive edge, then it should be done.
It seems to me that the county purchasing process should anticipate the additional costs created by using the non-local vendors. County Comissioners would probably be open to incorporating into their cost evaluations of potential product and service providers a formula for including the additional costs of transportation related pollution and the loss of local cash flow, which are local costs that are not inherently incorporated into the price proposed by the product or service provider.
If I recall correctly, the fellow that presented the all-day workshop at Fort Worden Commons mentioned that he might have some way of accompishing that.