The contentious policy that last week led to a leader of a business organization calling the Imperial Irrigation District board corrupt has reached its conclusion … for now.
The IID Board of Directors voted Tuesday to approve the procurement and bidding policies that district staff has been working on for about half a year.
A lot of time, effort and money has gone into developing the new policies to contract out services and construction work, General Manager Kevin Kelley said. That includes legal review and multiple presentations before the public.
“The fundamental question now is whether these policies, taken as a whole, add up to actual reform of a system that, admittedly, has fallen well short of the standards of transparency and accountability expected of a public agency,” he said.
To answer that, Kelley recommended a bid policy oversight committee be formed under the direction of the district ethics officer and assistant counsel Vance Taylor. The group would be charged with creating a standard operating procedure of which the chief concern would be to ensure strict adherence to the safeguards in the policy including prequalifying bidders, having an appeals process and price becoming a bigger portion of the evaluation process.
That committee will continue for a full year after the procurement policy goes into effect, Kelley said. While it may delay the procurement policy, it’s an extra component to imbue it with certainty and confidence.
Board members called for a review in a year to see how the policy is doing.
The new policy is a significant step toward moving the district forward, Taylor said. It deals with some of the big issues, like including a lowest responsible bid requirement on sealed bids, prequalifying prospective bidders and adding an appeal process.
Some of those issues and more had been brought forward through the last few months by the Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business. Members had said it’s possible to manipulate the system, and unless drastic changes are made, it’s going to continue to be manipulated.
There are still some parts of the policy that will cause the district problems, said Jim Duggins of Duggins Construction. Duggins chairs COLAB, but spoke Tuesday on his own behalf.
The evaluation process the district put into place is open to manipulation by staff, just as it had been before, he said. He said he wasn’t commenting on any individuals, but one or two bad people out of 1,000 can ruin it.
“Take it out of their hands,” he told the board, asking them to remove the evaluation process that is done in the dark.
The perception will be that the district is being dishonest if it isn’t completely transparent, he said.
Not all on the board were in favor of the policy as Directors Jim Hanks and Matt Dessert voted not to implement the policy.
The policy has been an ongoing problem, Hanks said, and he added he would have preferred more be done to bring it in line with the state bid policy.
Dessert had made his displeasure known at the beginning of the meeting, saying that though last week’s language at the meeting was unfortunate, it’s also disappointing that the district didn’t work more with outside groups, specifically COLAB.
Staff Writer Elizabeth Varin can be reached at evarin@ivpressonline.com or 760-337-3441.
Meeting glance
Here are five things that happened at Tuesday’s Imperial Irrigation District Board of Director’s meeting.
1 The district will ask state officials to give a presentation on what plans are for Salton Sea restoration within the next 90 days.
2 Director Anthony Sanchez asked for an item to be brought back to the board to freeze salaries of employees while the district looks into how to get control of salaries for top management officials.
3 IID staff presented its solar fallowing program before the board for the second time, getting some input on the proposed program to fallow agriculture-to-solar land for the life of the project with the condition that those lands go back to agriculture.
4 The board sent its support for three bills, two at the state and one federal level dealing with issues such as giving control of restoration efforts to the Salton Sea Authority, extending existing regulations on geothermal to extracted material and the settlement of water rights claims made by two Indian tribes in Arizona.
5 Staff gave its March Energy Cost Adjustment report, showing that the district continued to overcollect funds by about $3 million, bringing the total from 2011 and the first quarter of 2012 to more than $47 million. The quarterly adjustment hasn’t taken place yet, but the item is set to be brought back when the first quarter information is finalized.
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