Bid kerfuffle could prompt changes
Vendor selection process also raises questions
Frederick city’s budget and purchasing director is open to changing how the city solicits bids from outside vendors, following a complaint from a local company about the city’s bid process.
Russ Hodge, president of 3 Roads Communications, asked Mayor Randy McClement for help last week after the city’s purchasing department awarded a job to a vendor who bid $12,000 more than he did. The contract award was to be based on the lowest bid, according to an email to Hodge from the city's purchasing director, Keisha Brown, and the bid specifications.
Brown told Hodge in an email that the city didn’t receive his emailed bid and he was therefore disqualified from competing for the job. The bid specifications for the job of producing a series of videos for the Weinberg Center for the Arts 2017 – 2018 season instructed vendors to send bids via email or fax by June 14.
The specifications did not include file size restrictions for emailed bids. Hodge had emailed his bid on June 9, and followed up on June 13, according to an email chain he provided to The Frederick Extra. Brown told Hodge in an email that his bid was not received. He resent the bid the morning of June 14, and later inquired about the outcome and discovered that the city never got his second emailed bid, either. Hodge said he never received bounce-back notifications indicating that his emails were not delivered.
After investigating, the city’s IT/GIS Manager Matt Bowman said in an interview Wednesday that both 3 Roads’ emails, with attached bid documents, were rejected by the city’s main server because the file was too large to be delivered. The attachment for the email was about 16 MB and the city’s limit is 10 MB, Bowman said. The limitation is the “default” for file size for the city’s server, and he can raise or lower it. Keeping it lower helps keep the city’s server from bogging down, Bowman said. Even if he did raise it to 20 MB, Bowman said Hodge’s email still wouldn’t have cleared the bar because the attachment and the email totaled 21 MB.
Director of Budget and Purchasing Katie Barkdoll said in an interview Wednesday that it is “not unreasonable” for the city to add file size restrictions to its bid specifications moving forward. She said the city would also consider ideas such as confirming the receipt of bids to improve the process.
“It’s the vendor’s responsibility to get the information to us, so we can’t consider a quote or response that we don’t get,” Barkdoll said. “I don’t disagree that we can put file size restrictions on the specs. That’s an easy fix.” She said she was not aware of any similar situations where vendors had emailed bids that were not received by the city.
That doesn’t help Hodge, however, who feels the city should rebid the job because it didn’t specify file size, and because the city’s own server reveals that he emailed the bid twice, and before the deadline. When he asked Brown in an email about revisiting the process, she responded that “It has never been the City’s practice to follow up with firms we send a RFQ to. Altering decisions after the fact for a quote that was not received on time hurts our credibility with vendors and may prevent them from submitting in the future, thus decreasing competition on a broad scale which is not in the best interest of the City or taxpayers.”
Vendor selection process raises questions
The request for quotes was sent to six vendors selected by the Weinberg Center’s Marketing Manager Ashley Birdsell Lewis. Lewis said in an interview that in selecting vendors to bid on the job, she conducted “thorough research” and “included organizations recommended to me by my colleagues in the marketing industry.”
The companies she selected included Frederick County-based firms, 3 Roads Communications, Digital Bard Zesty Video Marketing, Coronation Media, and Generation Media. Two others, Graphcom and Viscul Creative are Pennsylvania firms.
The city’s solicitation policy gives preference to city and Maryland firms. Generation Media is owned by the spouse of Mayor Randy McClement’s executive assistant, Nikki Bamonti. The city’s bid solicitation policy requires a “proposer’s certification” that requires the vendor certify that no officer, employee or agent of the city is interested in the proposal. Generation Media did not submit a bid.
Only two, other than Hodge, responded. The city awarded the job of to Digital Bard, with a bid of $20,640. Digital Bard has previously produced videos for the Weinberg Center at no charge. Hodge’s bid was $8,250, and Coronation Media came in at $42,000.
“We selected [the vendors] based on past experience,” Lewis said. “It’s very important to us that they have experience with arts organizations, and I did take a look at their work online.” As for not including other Frederick city vendors, Lewis said that “if there aren’t any qualified in the city, then we go to the ones in the county.”
But Rhonda and Sayler McLaughlin of bigpicturemedia.tv in Frederick, are wondering why they were excluded because they are city based, and are, indeed, "qualified." They have done work for the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, and other arts organizations, Rhonda said. They also produced an award winning, free-to-the-city video for Frederick city’s economic development office in 2007, Frederick, A Great American Business Destination.
“You’d think they’d at least invite us to participate,” Rhonda McLaughlin said.
Although it’s not a large project, the McLaughlins said they would have loved a chance to produce videos for the Weinberg Center. “Why, with all the creative companies in city limits and in the county supporting all the local creative endeavors, is the city not allowing them to bid on this type of work?” Sayler McLaughlin said.
Disclosure: Russ Hodge has been a member of The Frederick Extra’s board of directors since September 2016.
