City promotes local vendor use

City Council is giving local vendors a leg up on regional and national competition. On Feb. 22, City Council unanimously approved Ordinace 0-1102-001 to amend the purchasing policies and procedures to add a section entitled “Local Vendor Preference Provisions.”

The ordinance gives local vendors an advantage when competing for city contracts. The ordinance states that when there is “a financial or operational benefit to the city as a result of less down time, faster delivery, an improved routine or warranty maintenance schedule, better agent response or other best management practice advantage” with the city, a local vendor preference provision may be enacted. To be considered for this ordinance, a local vendor must have had a city of Milledgeville business license for at least one year previous to the bid award date and have a current business license. The local vendor must also be able to match the qualified, low non-local vendor’s bid within seven percent.

According to City Councilman Steve Chambers, the motivations are to encourage local vendors to bid on city projects and stimulate local growth.

“Since the economy went south there has been a big push to try to create local growth everywhere, not just here but everywhere. You can see it from the state down,” Chambers said. “Basically everyone is trying to help their own. It’s a totally different atmosphere than its always been.”

For bigger city projects, larger companies from outside Milledgeville usually scoop up the projects. The Local Vendor Preference Provisions will try to alleviate this issue.

“What we are trying to do is to create the situation that if we have a situation where a small construction company that maybe in the past thought ‘I’m not going to bid on that because the (a larger, out-of-city company) or whoever are going to come along and zap it up,’ it kind of gives them the incentive to go ahead and participate in the bid process,” Chambers said. “And if they get within that seven percent, then they have the opportunity to meet or beat the winning bid. The winning bid is not always the lowest bid but it usually is. You are trying to get the best job for the best price.”

Unlike out-of-city or out-of-state contractors, local vendors have extra incentive to perform well.

“Number one they live here. If they do a shoddy job, they have to answer to it and answer to it all the time,” Chambers said. “And number two they probably take pride in their work. It might cost them a little bit but they are going to try to do it.”

According to Chambers, local spenders are also more likely to hire locally. So the Local Vendor Provisions Preference is not just for the company but also for all the employees involved in the company and locals they give work to.

“A lot of times when we are hiring people from out of town they are bringing people from other areas,” Chambers said. “It’s still not bad for the economy because they are staying in our hotels and eating our food and shop, but  at the same time we’re not helping out who all we need to help the most. You don’t have to be unemployed to necessarily hurt.”

While the city of Milledgeville bids out major projects, as a state institution Georgia College follows a different set of policies and procedures than the city according to Director of Materials Management and Central Services Mark Meeks.

“There are certain avenues we have to go through,” Meeks said. “The state of Georgia has something called the Georgia Procurement Registry. We put all our bid opportunities on there. It doesn’t focus in on Milledgeville vendors. It is statewide, nationwide. The way the state of Georgia looks at it they are trying to get the best value for their dollar.”

Georgia College is required to go through the bid process for any project over $5,000—projects like Herty Hall and the Wellness Center—in order to secure the lowest responsible and responsive bid, or best value bid. Under that threshold, however, the university tries to keep money locally by purchasing materials at establishments like Lowes and Ace Hardware.

“We are bound by state of Georgia state policy and procedure,” Meeks said. “If we are not in a bid situation we love dealing with local vendors, we prefer to deal with local vendors because they are right here and it helps Georgia College help the community. We want to be good stewards with the local tax payers money too. We want to get the best value. And sometimes that’s with local vendors and sometimes its not.”

Posted by Rebecca Burns on Mar 10 2011. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.