Travis County Commissioners Court
August 28, 2007
Item 28
Number 28 is to approve contract award for gasoline and diesel fuel, ifb number bo 70285 ld to the low responsive bidder, sun coast resources.
>> judge, Commissioners, this tunnel was before you last week. We had some errors in our memo that made it a little bit confusing. I sent you a revised memo. I think you got it last Friday, just correcting it. If I could quickly go through it, there were eight line items in the bid and line items 1, 2, 3 and 4 are the majority of fuel that we buy that is either regular fuel or diesel fuel. Items five and six are for what we're calling the Texas low emission diesel fuel. That's something that you approved back in November of '03 to help us meet our clean air requirements. This is -- a little cleaner gas. So we use that in the summer months. 7 and '8 were line items which is a fuel additive blend that they add at the plant to either one or two or three or four to make it a tceq approved lead. So we could award either items seven and eight or five and six and still meet our clean air requirements. Sun coast did not bid on five and six, but they did bid on line items seven and eight. So if yowm recall the seconded bier, petroleum traders, they made mistakes on 5, 67, 7 and 8, they did bid one, two, three and four correctly and they were still high. So sun coast, we can award all the items except five and six to sun coast and we still will meet our clean air requirements and sun coast was the low bidder. I also kind of went into detail because the -- the bid price that you see on the bid tab is the markup. And I explain in the memo, we pay whatever the price is based on opus index. We pay that price on the day it's delivered, plus we have all these fixed fees that we have to pay like taxes, we're having to pay a state sales tax or a state gas tax. We pay what's called a leks tax per gallon. We also have the federal oil spill tax, which is .0012 per gallon. Then we have state delivery fees on top of that. We still through these contracts get a better price than what we pay at the pump if we filled up our cars. We did only have the -- we had the two bier and one made an error. And some of the other bidders had other things going on. And then we also checked sun coast's bidder safety questionnaire, and our questionnaire that we have asks for major violations and moderate violations under tceq's regulations. Sun coast did have moderate violations for failure to ensure current certificates and those all have been resolved and they have an average rating with the agency. The court always has the option to reject all bids and go out again. And that's an option that you have but I would say that the price that we're paying right now, the market price that we're paying right now with petroleum traders is higher than what our -- this bid was with sun coast. Sun coast is the overall low bid other this bid.
>> I looked at this and there was some confusion and I guess my whole point is -- and then you're having to rewrite the memo to clarify, make it better understood as far as comprehension. I'm not pointing the finger at anybody. I think y'all do a great job on stuff. But if there's room in my opinion for where things are not clear, then if it's not clear here, then I'm just wondering if other folks probably still are seeing the same thing I'm seeing. And again, I'm not pointing the finger at anybody, but since it is unclear and it had to be rewritten for me to even understand it, I'm fearful that those who participate experienced the same. With that I would like to make a motion to reject this particular bid and send it out for rebid. And this form that you -- there is a form that we look be at to see the violations and thing of that nature with particular companies, and I don't know if that form need to be modified. I don't really know. But to look at other violations. It just may need to be that. But I'm moving to reject these at this point and then maybe also modify the form also. For notice of violation that may not even be present in this particular bid. So that's my motion is to reject all bids and send it out for rebid because of the, as you stated, the unclearness of what we ended up having to do.
>> is there a second?
>> there's a second, but I have an additional basis for it. I understand that the sun coast
>> [ inaudible ]. As well as talking previously that sun coast resources had failed to disclose compliance history issues too. And since I've seen that occur before, I believe it was bfi before who had failed to disclose.
>> was it wmi?
>> I think there needs to be consequence whz a bidder fails to disclose. And although they did come back I see from the August 1st letter and say we failed to mark the appropriate box for the moderate violations, those four moderate -- they described the four violations summarizing the actual violations since 2002. Did that include the minor violation as well with the spill?
>> no, that did not include that violation.
>> because they are required to based on -- they're not required to disclose minor violations based on our bid question?
>> correct.
>> so I was not holding that -- that's not a basis for my second. My base for the second is their failure to disclose their moderate violations, which they later divulged it.
>> did they divulge it later in our checking up on them?
>> I don't know the sequence. I think they just missed it. The normal person that fills out the questionnaire wasn't there and another lady did it and she said she the just missed it.
>> I do want to applaud your shop as well as tnr for crossing t's and dotting I's and ferreting out such information.
>> I appreciate that. We should have done that last week. That's an internal issue.
>> we have enough time to go back out and --
>> yes. What we have is we had on this current contract, which expires the end of this month, we have three months to -- we can extend it for three months if we need to. So there is time to redo it if that's the court's wish.
>> yes, sir.
>> it's become our general practice now and we're getting these bids coming through that we do a compliance check regardless of what they indicated on their form. And in fact, they had failed to indicate that they had any violations at all. And we just did a general compliance check and discovered that they had had in fact four agreed orders and in fact it was the one minor spill violation and then the three moderate certificate based on the violations. They then subsequently had to provide evidence of those issues while resolved and we got that from tceq finally in early August.
>> so john, it actually was tnr discovering it before sun coast resources provided additional information?
>> that's correct. It's become our general process that whenever these are going through purchasing sends these over to us to do a check to see if they have any compliance issue.
>> for the reason stated,
>> [inaudible - no mic]. There should be consequences for a bidder failing to disclose that.
>> motion to reject and rebid. All in favor? Show Commissioners Davis and eckhardt voting in favor and Commissioner Daugherty. And Commissioner Gomez, show judge Biscoe voting against.
>> one thing I would add or comment on is that we are -- it's time for us to hook at our bidder safety questionnaire and maybe moderate it some. If we will not have it dmun this -- the next time we put this out it will still go with the same questionnaire that we have currently t still is not asking for the minor violations, which is where the oil spill comes in, which I think tec's rules are strange, but that's a different issue.
>> thank you.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Wednesday, August 29, 2007, 18:30 AM