Council Not Required To Follow Same Rules On Procurement as Mayoral Agencies

Unlike mayoral agencies, the City Council does not follow the guidelines of the city’s Procurement Policy Board, which dictate’s how purchases with public money can be made.In 1991, shortly after the City Charter was rewritten and the board was formed, the council adopted its own set of rules. The six-chapter volume has never officially been updated.Unlike the purchasing rules of the city’s Procurement Policy Board, the council’s rules are not available on the Web for the public and vendors to examine. The council made the rules available to The New York Sun following submission of a request under the Freedom of Information Act.Though the council’s procurement rules state that purchases more than $500 should be done through some sort of competitive bidding, council officials said that the document is old and that the body’s guidelines generally mirror the rules of the Procurement Policy Board, which set that “small purchase” threshold at $5,000.While the city’s procurement regulations may not be great fodder for cocktail party conversations, a series of mass mailings sent out in June with campaign style photos of the council’s speaker, Gifford Miller, who is running for mayor, has led to questions about whether the council was following the rules.The $1.6 million mailings were divided into more than 150 jobs, almost all of which were less than $5,000. The jobs all were awarded to five printing companies without bidding. Mr. Miller said the council was following the law by getting the pamphlets sent before a blackout period that bans candidates from using their government office to pay for mass mailings in the 90 days before an election.The speaker’s chief of staff, Charles Meara, said last week that while the council did not bid out the most recent mailings, earlier printing jobs were done through competitive selections. The council, he said, had a history with the five companies it used and, as a result, is confident it got a good deal.He said that the council uses competitive bidding for the majority of the purchases it makes that cost $5,000 or more, but that its rules allow it to use discretion when that model does not make sense.In 1990, when the council was fighting to draft its own rules, Newsday quoted a letter sent from then-speaker, Peter Vallone Sr., to the Procurement Policy Board saying it would be “an impermissible and unacceptable breach of the doctrine of the separation of powers” to force the council to follow rules created by the mayor’s staff.Both the board’s and the council’s procurement rules prohibit artificially dividing jobs to avoid competition. The chairman of the Procurement Policy Board, Brendan Sexton, said that he was not familiar with the council’s rules, but that artificially splitting contracts is a violation for mayoral agencies.“If a mayoral agency had a $2 million bricklaying job or was buying $2 million worth of hot lunches for a senior center, and the comptroller found that there were 65 tiny contracts, there would be questions about whether there was any contract splitting involved,” Mr. Sexton said. “There may be a legitimate answer, but the question would still be asked.”Mr. Sexton, a former city sanitation commissioner, said: “If you’re spending $2 million of the public’s money, you make sure there are all kinds of procedures involved to protect that money. If you have an agency that wants to buy a crate of pencils, you don’t want them to have to go through that process because it doesn’t protect the public. It’s only common sense.”

Council Not Required To Follow Same Rules On Procurement as Mayoral Agencies

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