Cutting needless red tape can buy county more for its bucks

Is Miami-Dade suddenly getting serious about reforming its buying of goods and services? 

We all know the system is a mess, but commissioners for decades have winked at the millions it costs taxpayers every year. Now a task force aims to straighten it out.

Commission Chairman Anthony Rodriguez this week is proposing that 15 experts probe county buying top to bottom and report how to fix it. He would appoint outsiders, many of whom have dealt with county purchasing.

Under the microscope are buying goods and services, architectural and engineering services, construction contracting, public-private partnerships and unsolicited proposals, lease and development agreements, concession agreements, and waste-to-energy contracts. 

Unless team members are blindfolded, they’re going to find red tape and inequities up and down the line. The system is rife with them. It’s clear that county purchasing has lost its focus. 

If you’re buying for yourself, you start with what you need and then examine the price and quality of what you’re offered. Miami-Dade’s internal buying priorities list 36 separate points to consider. Outrageously, need, cost and quality are ignored.

Almost two years ago Mayor Daniella Levine Cava ordered everyone who buys county goods and services to follow what she called a “rollout of purpose-driven procurement review process” that “will focus on engaging businesses and residents in new ways, improving working conditions, prioritizing environmental considerations and ensuring ethical behavior throughout the county’s buying chain.”

She mandated eight social benefits to consider for every purchase or contract, then listed 16 “equity, inclusion, and worker protection” considerations and 14 resilience reviews for each contract and added six more social engineering questions.

Whether or not these items are desirable socially, none is relevant to purchasing. Yet vendors to the county must jump through hoop after hoop to prove they meet county standards on each item on the mayor’s list. Every hoop they jump through costs vendors money so – guess what? – they raise prices in county contracts to recover those costs. 

Taxpayers pay for dozens of goodies in every contract besides what the county really came to buy. It’s like going to a clothing store to buy socks and being forced to pay for a full outfit.

Why should reducing the use of gasoline be considered in every purchasing contract? But it’s on the mayor’s checklist. Unless the contract is for motor vehicles, gas use is irrelevant to county purchasing – or should be.

Also superfluous is a standard to favor vendors that are benefitting communities “above and beyond the project requirements,” which also is in every purchasing review. That’s nice, but why pay extra for office supplies or paving to do that? 

Also raising costs needlessly are preferences that give a price edge to various categories of vendors, differentiations that have nothing to do with the need, price or value of what the county is buying.

Percentage edges are built into bid selections for local vendors, and then “local” is boosted further depending on whether a company has a local representative, an office or a headquarters – three percentage preferences depending on where a company is based. We’d all like to buy locally, but how much extra should we pay, if anything, for that preference?

In fact, bid choices are also skewed to favor minority owners, minority teams that bidders must add to contracts, small businesses, and companies owned by the handicapped, military veterans, women, businesses with union contracts, businesses that pay county-set minimum wages, firms that aid county environmental aims, and more. Those preferences help the county favor some groups but not in the need-price-quality criteria that apply in the rest of the world.

Whatever happened to the level playing field where the best bidder or vendor actually wins?

It’s doubtful a task force named by the commission chairman would mention it, but county purchasing is also heavily influenced by friends, campaign donors and lobbyists. 

Two years ago, Commissioner Keon Hardemon complained in a meeting of “rigging” of bidding and said “I guarantee you that if there’s a delay [in awarding a contract] someone got paid.”  

Would-be vendors, in fact, are deterred from even seeking county contracts not just by selection processes that may drag on for years but by the fact that favored companies are more likely to win in the end, and that if they do bid it will cost them more to participate and jump through all the hoops than to sell to businesses, which focus on – surprise – need, cost and quality.

The proposed county task force – which is totally advisory – is likely to seek to simplify purchasing, lowering costs to taxpayers and vendors alike. The more irrelevant red tape its suggestions help cut, the better.