Bracelet bids free taxpayers from bad deal
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share thisWhen he was pressed about his administration's failure to seek bids for as many county services as possible, former Commissioner Robert C. Cordaro formerly declared that competitive bidding is a "canard." His administration, he declared, was able to obtain better deals through negotiation with selected contractors.
Actually, the canard regarding bidding for public contracts is that all professional services should be exempt. A new contract with a company that provides house-arrest monitoring bracelets, for example, unshackles taxpayers from a lousy deal that had been achieved by negotiation.
The county will save a whopping $240,000 a year on the deal with Behavioral Interventions Inc. That company had a negotiated contract under which it charged $5.68 per bracelet per day, but competitive bidding forced it to reduce its price to $1.30 per day.
And that's just the direct savings.
Under the bidding process, the company also raised a ceiling on the number of bracelets it would provide from 150 to 500. That, in turn, means that more convicts who are eligible for home confinement will be sentenced to it rather than to the county prison, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in incarceration costs.
Minority Commissioner A.J. Munchak, who had been a majority commissioner with Mr. Cordaro, said this week that his administration had "goofed" by failing to seek bids for the bracelets before renewing the incredibly expensive contract. That's obvious, but it doesn't explain why his administration followed that wayward and expensive course.
Commissioners Corey O'Brien and Michael Washo were on the mark in pursuing bids, and they should systematically do so, with few exceptions, each time a negotiated contract for professional services comes up for renewal.
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