Yesterday I promised a specific about Huntley School District 158’s procurement process.

And I see Northwest Herald reporter Tom Musick has written a story about a $2 million custodial contract, so let’s look at it.

$2 million.

If you back out the teachers’ salaries, $2 million amounts to about 5% of the school district’s operating budget. Even more, if utilities were excluded.

If you were on the Huntley School Board, would you want to ask for bids or not for that part of the budget?

If you had just been given a scathing report on internal controls that said,

would you want to encourage competition or just cross your fingers and renew the contract?

According to the NW Herald article, Board President Shawn Green is concerned about whether the janitors will be able to be understood. Can’t read black board messages not to clean a room, it seems.

I wonder if the janitorial firm has checked its employees’ Social Security numbers against the E-Verify list offered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Even, if a State of Illinois makes that illegal.

Aileen Seedorf wants competitive bidding, the article reports.

The story says board member Kevin Gentry, who is a CPA, but who trailed Seedorf in the spring elections,

“said he would be interested in a bidding process only if it could save the district significant money.

“’If the upside is immaterial, I wouldn’t be interested in bidding,’ Gentry said.”

Now, I’m a guy who was in charge of preparing the bid forms for state government’s purchasing of natural gas from suppliers in the mid-1980’s. Couldn’t figure that out who would save taxpayers the most money without getting bids.

(Oh, I could figure out the favorite of Governor Jim Thompson’s office, but that wasn’t my job. That firm did not win until I was let go; “no line item” for my salary was what I was told.)

Anyway, same situation here. No way to know if Huntley School District taxpayers could save money without asking for bids.

And, over-$100,000-a-year Chief Financial Officer and former school board member Glen Stewart thinks preparing and evaluating bids would be take too much time and work on his staff’s part.

Really. That’s in the article:

”Stewart questioned whether any potential savings from a bidding process would be worth the time and resources that it would require from administrators.”

And, I thought having a business guy in that post might be useful.

What would the school district stand to lose by going out to bid?

N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

There’s an option to renew for next year.

When Gentry asked what the price differentials were between GCA and the other bidders the last time it was bid, Stewart and Doug Renkosik, Operations and Maintenance Director, didn’t have the information available.

Let’s look at another contract on which janitorial firm GCA bid—a three-year grounds maintenance contract.

First, let’s look at bids for a performance bond:

Vendor A $10,000
Vendor B $ 4,000
GCA $305,000

That wasn’t for the work; that was just for the performance bond.

For the actual work on the three-year contract, here’s what was bid (excluding the performance bond):

Vendor A $ 651,000
Vendor B $ 847,000
GCA $ 846,000

So, it seems that there just might be an itty-bitty chance that GCA might not end up being the lowest bidder to do janitorial services.

Stewart was even a board member at the time, but neither he nor fellow majority bloc members Kim Skaja or Mike Skala seem to have remembered that GCA was high bidder on this grounds maintenance contract.

So, if you were on the school board, would you vote to require bids or not?