After they couldn’t be bothered with voting up or down on individual expensive engineering contracts for projects around the island, members of Ocean City Council last week found religion about competition.
At the Feb. 11 meeting they talked on and on about the importance of the competitive bidding process and then approved an empty resolution (a framework) to change the way engineering firms are chosen in the future.
On the surface, the proposal looks like good government at work, but the way it was rushed into a formal but vague resolution leaves the jury out on that. The devil will be in the details, to be decided in the next few weeks, and down the road when the new, to-be-determined process is put to the test.
The timing is surprising given that it wasn’t that long ago council members unanimously ignored a request from members of the public to pull five resolutions from a consent agenda in August awarding a cumulative $629,100 to three engineering firms.
Members of the OC Flooding Committee wanted to be able to comment on the individual contracts, which can’t be done on a consent agenda that has council voting yea or nay on the entire package. Committee members criticized one of the firms being used, ACT Engineering, and the administration, namely in the former of engineer and business administrator George Savastano. That prompted Councilman Keith Hartzell to ask Savastano to defend himself and the administration’s process, a defense he and Council President Bob Barr supported.
Last week, however, Hartzell and Barr were among five council members voting against Savastano and the administration and denying, at least for now, a new $55,000 contract for ACT on a flood-mitigation project in the West 17th Street neighborhood.
In a more important move, they and council members Jody Levchuk and Michael DeVlieger argued in favor of a proposal by first-year Councilman Tomaso Rotondi on a new way of awarding engineering contracts.
The proposal culminated in a resolution calling for requests for proposals (RFPs) from engineering firms to be part of a pool for the city to use for future contracts over a three-year period.
As Rotondi explained, the firms would be vetted and pre-approved to be in the pool. From there, the city could choose one of those firms for a given project or put a project out to bid among the firms in the pool without sending bids out to the general public.
As a majority of council members argued Thursday evening, competition makes sense and is good government. However, that ignored the fact council has always had the power to veto any contract the administration proposed but just hasn’t taken the initiative.
One dissenting member of council, Pete Madden, said he believes council is overstepping its bounds, that the administration has been making unprecedented progress on capital projects from roads to dredging to flood-mitigation and council should allow it to continue unfettered. Council’s role, he summed up, is to “make sure there is a well-run city, not run the city.”
That received polite but pointed blowback from Levchuk and Barr, who said Rotondi’s proposal is well within council’s purview. Barr also took exception after Madden said, “I just want to make sure we’re not putting politics ahead of progress.” Barr denied council was being political, that all were doing what they think is best for the city, and to make that accusation was “crossing the line.”
The reason politics could be underlying the move is the lack of explanation why all of a sudden council decided to assert itself on the issue of awarding engineering contracts, which as noted during the meeting amounted to some $7 million alone in the past five years for ACT Engineers and Anchor QEA, which it partnered with on dredging.
There also was the comment by Rotondi at the meeting that he refined his idea, in part, by working “with some people I’m close with in the political realm,” asking how they handled contracts.
That, too, can be innocuous. Rotondi said that at the public meeting. He didn’t hide that fact.
However, the way things were handled got the political spidey-senses tingling.
There were the comments by Rotondi and Madden. There was a long discussion about competition that council members clearly prepared for in advance. And then there is the fact a resolution was created in the middle of the meeting, added to the consent agenda and voted upon.
Because council members knew in advance what they were doing, why didn’t they put a resolution on the announced agenda?
The resolution that was approved, ironically as part of a consent agenda the way many of the engineering contracts were approved in the recent past, was empty. It was in name only, without any substance.
Why rush an empty resolution onto the agenda when they could have prepared a detailed resolution for a future meeting?
Fears that politics are behind this move will increase or dissipate as council decides what details go into the resolution about how engineering firms are chosen for the pool and how much influence is exerted in deciding which firms get contracts in the future.
This bears watching.