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Town Manager Search Committee Chairman Eric Steinhilber, committee member Town Councilor James Crocker and at large committee member Phyllis Miller, as well as Town Councilor Frederick Chirigotis, who was in the audience at the meeting, check their calendars to schedule the next meeting.
HYANNIS – The Barnstable Town Manager Search Committee has gotten itself into a sticky situation.
The committee embarked on a quote process but is now considering a request for proposals process.
Johanna Boucher, the town’s chief procurement officer, explained at the committee’s meeting yesterday, that the committee cannot cancel the process if the bidders have been both responsive, meaning they met the criteria that was asked of them, and responsible, meaning their references check out.
“There has to be a reason why in the best interest would you cancel this quote process, if they met your requirement of the quote, which they did,” Boucher said.
At its meeting last week, the committee was expecting it would receive just two quotes, one from the Edward J. Collins Jr. Center for Public Management at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and one from Gov HR USA, which is the search firm owned by Joellen C. Earl, who formerly worked as assistant town manager in Barnstable.
Instead it received three quotes. Besides the Collins Center and Gov HR, a quote came in from Municipal Resources Inc. out of New Hampshire.
Because of the three quotes received, Boucher said the committee had to take the lowest quote.
The Collins Center was the low quote at $19,000. Gov HR came in at $19,500 and Municipal Resources came in at $20,000.
But several committee members pointed out that Gov HR included four trips to Barnstable within its expenses and the other two firms only included three trips.
If the price of one trip, which Gov HR estimated at $1,500 were eliminated, that firm would have the low quote, the committee’s chairman Town Councilor Eric Steinhilber of Hyannis said.
Committee member James Crocker, the town councilor from Osterville, said Earl seemed to have lost the bid because she was providing more services by offering more visits.
But Committee Vice Chair Sara Cushing, a town councilor from Marstons Mills, said, it made sense that Earl’s expenses were twice as high as the other firms since she had to travel from Illinois where her company is based.
When pressed by Crocker to say that Earl was providing more services for the money, committee member Paul Hebert said he did not believe that was the case, since all three firms had answered the quote process by presenting their cost to do a search.
The quote process requires the acceptance of the lowest quote, Boucher said.
Both Richard Kobayashi from the Collins Center and Earl had come in to speak to committee members about their company’s search process.
Two committee members had reacted negatively to some comments made by Kobayashi.
In response to concerns about the town’s search process expressed by committee member Paul Hebert, Kobayashi had said that from what he had read through research of the committee’s charge, from meeting minutes and from media reports, he believed the committee’s process was flawed.
At the following meeting, two committee members, chairman Eric Steinhilber and Ann Canedy, had said they did not appreciate Kobayashi’s comments.
But two other committee members, Hebert and Sara Cushing, the committee’s vice chairman, said they did appreciate his comments.
At the beginning of yesterday’s meeting, Boucher explained that, for the quote process, she re-contacted two firms that had previously said they did not want to participate in the process. This time, the firms both said they would like to participate.
One firm, MMA Consulting Group Inc. out of Plymouth, though, did not get a quote in on time.
The other firm, Municipal Resources, did get a quote in on time.
Boucher said the firm’s principal said he did not want to submit a quote when she first contacted him. He had participated in the town’s town manager search process in 2012 when a committee asked for quotes and then canceled the search process.
Boucher recounted their conversation. “He said, ‘We went through an exercise before.’ I said, ‘Nothing is intended to be an exercise. This is a very real process and sometimes things happen and things change. That’s how municipalities in our business work.’”
After she reassured him about the process, he decided to submit a quote.
The search committee will continue to discuss the three quotes at its next meeting on Tuesday, October 20, at 4:30 p.m. at Barnstable Town Hall.
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