City staff is recommending that the Tallahassee City Commission award a technology contract to a company that was one of the highest bidders of the five companies that provided proposals.
The company, HighStreet IT Solutions, who submitted a price of $2.74 million with their proposal, edged out the second place company, HTC Global Services on a 100 point scoring system that included six categories. The score was 70.37 to 70.15.
However, the second place company – HTC Global Services – submitted a proposal that included a price of $667,000. That price is approximately $2 million less than the winner.
A review of the bids show that the winning company submitted a price that was higher than prices submitted by three other bidders, including HTC Global Services.
How did this happen?
In the City’s scoring system, HighStreet IT Solutions made up the majority of the point deficit due to their higher price by out scoring HTC Global Services 39.15 to 29.79 in the Statement of Work category.
TR reached out to Jonathan Kilpatrick, the Director of Technology and Innovation, for a comment, but have yet to get a response.
The Tallahassee City Commission is scheduled to vote on the staff recommendation at their Wednesday meeting.
City staff created and released an RFP in December 2018, to support and manage the PeopleSoft Human Capital Management System (HCM) and Financial Management System (FMS) hosted in the CenturyLink cloud environment.
City to Consider High Bidder for Technology Contract added by Steve Stewart on
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Mr. Stewart’s agenda never changes. The City is always wrong, the City is corrupt, the City cannot be trusted. If any news story does not fit this meme, it never makes it to the paper. For anyone who has ever done public procurement, reading this news story shows the author is clueless on the issues any public sector buyer faces.
ALSO: Is the Winning Bidder allowed to Sub Contract out the Work? What is to stop the Contractor, who you are going to Pay $2.7 Million, from hiring HTC Global Services and pay THEM $800,000 to do the Job for them?
What I want to know is: Are these Companies able to do it 100% for what their Bid was? Do you have it in the Contracts that they MUST fulfill the Contract FOR THAT AMOUNT or Else? “ELSE” being, we SUE them.
Unfortunately you have the story wrong this time! Lowest bidder is current provider. Current provider was part of a long relationship with City as a provider. Current provider was part of larger corporation who filed bankruptcy and was taken over. Current provider fails in many ways to provide good service to City and had a high score based solely on cost. Systems are down quite often, cost overruns and poor staffing. Current provider would do anything, including low ball the cost to not lose the contract, would continue to provide poor service and nickel and dime the City and it’s taxpayers along the way. There is a reason why lowest cost is not always best option!!!
The story presents the facts as provided in city documents. The information you provide was not included in any city document. If you would like to go on the record please call Steve Stewart at 766-6208.
667 is a horrible joke.
They don’t even care what this means for people who actually do the work — hundreds of unpaid overtime hours
Where was this RFP advertised? Does anyone know?
Having responded to many RFPs in my company’s 30 year history, I found the results could easily be manipulated by the scoring of subjective questions. Commissioners should protect taxpayers by withholding a decision and review questions and respondents answers to see why their is such a large financial difference.
There has to be enough money in the contract to pay kickbacks.
Actually the kick-backs are sorted out and awarded to favored contractors later in the process by overpayment approval of work to be done with the “wink wink” expectation for generous future campaign contributions and other in- kind thievery.
Here in the initial contract awarding process it’s much less complex. Consideration only need be given to the bidder(s) with the most likelihood of providing substantial future campaign contributions to our beloved liberal commissioners next run for office.
2 MILLION DOLLARS!!!!
Come on Mayor Dailey – call thievery what it is! Please stand up for our City!!!!
Government standards in the absence of corruption help to establish true cost of valuable services in the marketplace!
Well an RFP (Request For Proposal) does not have to be completely based on price only, but what will benefit the city the most. There are other factors that determine who gets the award.
In order to award a contract on price-base only, you would do a solicitation called an ITB (Intent to Bid), where the intent to award is based on price alone- lowest bid amount in other words. This is Chapter 287 in the Florida Statues.