Dear Editor:
Planned pork barrel "city friends with benefits" procurement policy at New Westminster city hall.
The City of New Westminster is planning to drive a dagger into the hopes and dreams of New Westminster small business owners with its nefarious "best practices" plan to change how it procures (spends taxpayer money) city services. Our city is moving away from an open and public procurement process towards a "city friends with benefits" procurement policy where insiders will get city business and everyone else will be left in the dark.
I will only briefly mention how our city often ignores posting contract opportunities to its website in favour of "sole sourcing" contracts to one preferred insider. The sole sourcing gravy train runs like a thick river throughout our city's various departments and is a preferred method of doing business.
The present state of affairs (if a contract is not sole sourced) is that our city must post potential contracts (up to $100,000 in value) to the city website, where anyone with a computer can see the tender opportunity and bid on the opportunity.
Well, in a classic case of double speak, our city staff is preaching "best practices" while actually doing the opposite by proposing to remove any outside opportunity to secure city business.
City staff are complaining that posting the city's (less than $75,000 value) business opportunities to the city website is just too much work and the solution is . just remove the obligation for any outside public notice of the city's business opportunities. The managers will still need to find three quotes from contractors but (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) just who do you think they will call when most small businesses are not even aware that an opportunity exists because nothing is posted to any external website?
Any small business would give its eye teeth for an opportunity to secure a $75,000 contract with the City Of New Westminster, but any small business that is not on a manager's city-paid smart phone's contact list will have no opportunity to secure such a profitable contract.
The public, small business owners, and our mayor and council will be nothing but poorly tended mushrooms if the proposed procurement policy amendments pass. We will be totally in the dark on what business opportunities are available, and we won't have a clue about what city insiders are getting their share of the taxpayer-funded procurement pork barrel.
Wake up, mayor and council! The proposed procurement policy amendments stink and need to be shredded.
Why the silence from the New Westminster Chamber of Commerce? NEXT New West members . advocates for small business and social media proponents of the city . what are your thoughts?
Christopher Bell, New Westminster
