So word out of South Florida is that my blog on the Broward Selection Committee and its curious path to selecting a vendor for the accounting system in the county has gotten the attention of many of the uber elite in Broward. Some like it, some do not.
I have heard from a lot of my readers and readers of the Broward Bulldog that the connections we already wrote about are just the tip of the iceberg; evidently lobbyists connections on this deal mirror a game of Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon. (Paging Bernie Friedman of Becker Polikoff: Nan Rich is on line 1 and all of your clients who are connected to this bid are on line 2, together.)
But this is not all that surprising in the world we live in. Procurements, lobbying, it happens. Shameful but seemingly the norm. What is surprising, however, and one I am shocked no one else is writing about is the $22 MILLION difference between the highest and lowest bidder OR the unusual use of this cost normalization, which on increased ever bidders’ price by millions.
This is real money people and if the selection committee comes back next week and sticks with its Mickey Mouse ranking system, they will have put the original HIGHEST original into negotiating posture or even the original second highest bidder. And take one guess how that conversation will go:
Broward Selection Committee: Congratulations, you have won and we would like to negotiate.
Winning Bidder: Yay, us! We would love to make millions more than we originally bid.
Broward Selection Committee: We would like you to do the work as the third -party vendor proposed in its cost normalization analysis, but for your original bidding price.
Winning Bidder: Um, no. We will only do it for the price that the cost normilization analysis estimated.
And the negotiations will go on from there and the end result would be paying that vendor millions more than they initially bid. Or the staff selection committee could throw out the normalization proposal that should’ve never been introduced in the first place and pick a bidder based on things like experience, best value, lowest risk and best company to spend taxpayer dollars on. I know, crazy idea, but I thought I would throw it out there just in case logic prevailed and common sense could sink in.
Come on Broward, wake up, and find a bean counter who actually knows the value of a bean – especially when it is someone else’s beans.
