As Dallas’ board of directors, the City Council is responsible for every taxpayer penny spent. Council members should vote down a proposal to cede more of that duty to unelected officials.
On today’s council agenda there’s an item that would raise the dollar amount city staff can spend without going to the council for approval. For goods and certain services such as insurance or technical services, the threshold would increase from $100,000 to $300,000. For architecture, engineering and construction services, it would jump all the way to $500,000.
City staff said last week the goal is to increase procurement efficiency while preserving council oversight. Our view is that this proposal would cost more in terms of transparency and accountability than it would benefit the city in terms of streamlining.
Whether it’s staff exercising too much power over the process or council members pressuring them to do so, the existing process is already too skewed toward the city’s perennial favorite contractors and vendors.
Opinion
There’s no reason to make that problem worse. Even if staff members start producing a procurement report for council members’ review, as proposed in a recent memo, taking the items off agendas decreases public visibility and opportunity for engagement.
The guiding principles for this conversation need to be transparency and fair competition for those who want to do business with the city.
There are some elements of the city’s procurement process that are as mundane as the name implies — buying gas for city vehicles, library grounds maintenance or even vision insurance plans. One of the more interesting ones includes last year’s terrible $200,000 plan to buy garden box kits for up to 1,000 households from what was apparently a real estate company with no connection to gardening.
Maximizing accountability and transparency is an important part of preventing underhanded procurement practices like split purchasing from taking root. This is a tactic that involves dividing contracts to avoid hitting a threshold that would require additional approval.
Dallas isn’t a stranger to stuff like that. After the Stemmons debacle that cost taxpayers $29 million, a review found that several job orders were “split between vendors at or around $499,999 to avoid routing for additional approvals.” The Texas government code requires job orders exceeding $500,000 to go through council approval.
To be fair, most of the staff responsible for the Stemmons mess aren’t with the city anymore. But still, it’s a good lesson for what can happen when council members aren’t watching closely enough.
There’s another component to this agenda item that would increase the amount of money the city can spend without using a competitive bidding process from $50,000 to $100,000. This one is a little easier to get behind, only because 50 grand doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to when it comes to city purchases.
With all of that said, there is a real need to increase the speed of City Hall business — it just shouldn’t come at the expense of transparency and resident involvement. The council should study and discuss procurement efficiency as a broader issue instead of accepting whatever idea staff drops into their collective lap.
Instead of delegating more responsibility off to staff, council members should take the initiative and put the work in. That’s what voters send them to 1500 Marilla to do.