Abele’s aides, if youremember, stonewalled on providing the current operator, Milwaukee TransportServices (MTS), the documents it needs to appeal the contract that Abele wantsto award to the Texas-based, for-profit MV Transportation.
MTS won its case, andthe county had to provide it—and Veolia, another bidder that didn’t win thecontract—with thousands of pages of documents.
MTS and Veolia arecurrently appealing the RFP process in front of a panel made up of MilwaukeeCounty supervisors. Its next meeting will be held next Tuesday.According to therules of the appeal, MTS and Veolia can win their appeal if they can prove thatthe process by which the county awarded the $164 million annual contract to MVwas faulty. The county can then rescore the results, and perhaps award a newwinner, or go through the whole process again.
MTS’s and Veolia’sarguments show just how flawed the RFP process was and provides a glimpse intothe workings of the Abele administration that the public wouldn’t have seen ifMTS had not gone to court to force the administration to turn over itsdocuments.Some things to thinkabout:
- MV had the lowest scorefor the technical portion of the bid—which comprises 80% of the points for theRFP. Veolia got the highest technical score. Yet because MV fudged its numbersfor the costs to run the system, it scored the highest for the cost portion ofthe proposal, 20% of the score. MV therefore won the contract. So the worstcompany for providing bus service won because it low-balled its costs.
- MV’s cost proposal doesn't appear to be serious. In fact, it was so laughable that afterthe RFP panel decided that MV would win the contract, it sent the company alist of 22 questions about its proposal.
Crazily, MV respondedto the county’s question about the costs by saying, in effect, that its priceproposal wasn’t serious and that it expected to renegotiate the financialportion of the document at a later date:
"If selected, thecompany respectfully requests to sit down with the county to decide on a finalallocation between the three cost components, based on the county’sinterpretation of the individual cost elements. Then the final amounts writteninto the contract would be binding to MV for the contract term."
- Only MV was given a“do-over” to correct its deficient proposal.
- MTS, which has run MCTSfor almost 40 years, also argues that the RFP itself was biased against thecurrent operator, and skewed toward selecting a new operator. An example of abiased question includes: “List up to three references of similar transitmanagement assignments.” The evaluators were instructed to award points basedon how many references were provided. Well, MTS’s only client is MilwaukeeCounty, so it scored low on this question because it provided only onereference—but two dozen letters of recommendation from local leaders andorganizations.
- There’s no evidencethat the county followed up by calling any of the references that biddersprovided. And the panel didn’t hear oral presentations from the bidders,either.
And this is theadministration that worked with tea party legislators to consolidate power inits own hands and diminish oversight from the county board? I’d hate to thinkwhat would have happened if the board just got to rubber stamp Abele’s contractwithout a proper public vetting.
According to the scheduleof the county’s Administrative Determination Review Committee, the county willrespond by Jan. 23. Arguments and deliberation are scheduled for Feb. 18.
