Travis County Commissioners Court
January 2, 2007
Item 5
Five is to approve contract award for rental of cargo vans, ifb number b 070026-rg to the sole bidder, enterprise rent a car, for the county clerks I should add. First. Commissioner?
>> good morning. Hello, Commissioner, okay.
>> thank you very much. I had a brief question. I was question about the 148 solicitations and having -- two questions actually. And having gotten only one response. I was wondering how could we improve the solicitation process in the future to get more bids than just the one?
>> well, just a brief background. We implemented a new e procurement system last year. Basically we have a third-party administrator, rfp depot, who electronically sends out all of our solicitations online. The advantage of that it goes to people all over the country. On certain solicitations such as this one you really need a local vendor because we're renting the cars here locally. So that is probably the reason we only got one solicitation. I know in the past we have gotten another local vendor, but apparently they did not respond. So hopefully through the r.f.p. Process wem be getting more -- we will be getting more solicitations.
>> there are only two vend eshz for this type of vehicle in the area?
>> I think there's probably more than that. This one was the only one that was interested. What we do is depending on the number of elections we have during the year, we use them at like a peak time. We might use 20 or 30 vehicles in a two week period. So they have to sort of kind of promise this is an annual contract because we need to be able to go to them whenever we have an election quickly without going through a bid process. They have to be willing to tie up and have available that number of van for us at one peak period. So it's a little bit of a planning and reserving on their part.
>> whether they have that kind of stock.
>> right. And also when I saw this because of the amount of money that we had spent and' I also had got a declaration of vans and things that we were auctioning off and I actually called our fleet manager and spoke with him as to whether we could reserve some of these old cargo vans that we were auctioning off, that it would be more cost beneficial, and of course he looked at it and said no, it wasn't because we only use them for a week at a time and we would have to maintain insurance and all those other things. So we sort of looked at some other options.
>> I think what you've got here, Commissioner, is these things being used mostly during the election times or whatever, there are not a lot of companies in town that have access to -- because there's somebody that kind of got in line to get all those, and so there's not enough business for a lot of folks to be in that business to have 20 and 30 of these --
>> for that kind of stock.
>> the truth of the matter is there aren't many people around here that really have the ability to furnish that many of what we need.
>> for a short period of time.
>> and this is yet another just catchup question. I'm trying to understand the bid sheets because the first offer is $269. Then the second -- that's a unit price of $269. Then below it there's also a unit price of $59. I was just curious because it appears that the make and model for which the bid was made are the same in both of the offers.
>> right. One is a weekly price and one is a daily price.
>> ah.
>> so we rented it for the week, then we would get it for 269. If we rented them by the day we would get them for $59 a day.
>> that makes sense. Thank you for pointing that out to me.
>> well, it is complicated. And when you called it up, I started looking at it. I'm getting used to our new rfp process. It's saving us a lot of time. We're actually calculating the amount of money that we're saving by using the software and so it's really a good thing. And also if wech vendors who do not want to -- if we have vendors who do not want to use the system, we will still mail them out or e-mail them and they can send them in in paper form. We're getting caught on our technology.
>> that answers my question, thank you.
>> you will have a lot of questions.
>> move approval.
>> those are good questions.
>> second.
>> those are things that jump out at you.
>> discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. Thank you.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, January 210, 2007 8:14 AM