It’s been awhile since we last checked in on what the Park Ridge Park District has been doing with its approximately $25 million annual budget.

As we’ve written previously, the Park District has done an exceptional job of generating non-tax (i.e., user fee-based) revenues to the point that they now exceed tax revenues. And that deserves kudos, because the path of least resistance is to underprice fees to keep the users happy while letting the all-too-silent taxpayers subsidize those users.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the District stumbled a bit in its contracting for the retrofitting of the buildings on the former Park Ridge Youth Campus – now known as “Prospect Park” – to accommodate a modern computer network and integrate it into the District’s existing system. Fortunately, it sounds as if the Park Board is taking reasonable measures to square that away.

The District’s administration apparently tried to steamroll a “bundled” contract for the purchase of IT services with the purchase of the hardware for the project. And that’s where the Board balked.

At its meeting on October 15, the Board – with president Jim O’Brien absent – deadlocked 3-3 on a vote to approve the integrated service/hardware contract. Commissioners Joan Bende, Jim Phillips and Cindy Grau voted for approval while Commissioners Rick Biagi, Mel Thillens and Richard Brandt voted against it.

Biagi and Thillens expressed their belief that the District might be able to get a better price than the approximately $80,000 quoted by IT consultants Sikitch LLP for the “equipment” (hardware and software) – along with its $30,000 of actual IT services – if the District went out to bid.

We don’t know if that’s true or not. But allowing consultants (like Sikitch) to bundle their professional services with a much larger dollar amount of products that customarily require such bidding is a common scam by government contractors, consultants and bureaucrats that often bamboozle the folks we elect to look out for the taxpayers’ interests.

That’s because the bureaucrats love it: it reduces their workload and greatly reduces the likelihood that they will be held accountable should something go wrong. But it improperly mixes the contracting for professional services that can legally be done (although it doesn’t have to be) on a no-bid basis with the purchases of commodities (hardware and software) that should be competitively bid.

According to the Park Ridge Journal article (“Park’s Computer Needs Concern Park Ridge Commissioners,” Nov. 11), a Sikitch rep and the District’s IT manager, Mark Somera, claimed that Sikitch could get reduced prices on the hardware/software from manufacturers like Hewlett-Pcckard through volume buying for Sikitch clients.

Not necessarily the best prices, mind you.  Just “reduced” prices.

But when Board members asked why the District couldn’t just take Sikitch’s list of components and shop around for the best deal, the Sikitch rep in attendance pled ignorance, claiming that wasn’t his area of expertise. Apparently Sikitch was so confident its no-bid deal had already been cooked to the right degree of doneness that it didn’t to send someone capable of answering what sounds like a pretty basic question.

Hence, the 3-3 tie that prevented the contract’s approval.

That reportedly torqued Exec. Director Gayle Mountcastle, who responded with a litany of delays and woes that would ensue from any type of competitive bidding on the computer hardware – including a further delay in the opening of Prospect Park.

Which, reportedly, already is a year behind the original target date.

And already hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget.

And already having cut some of those features the District used to sell the project to the voters in the April 2013 referendum.

Of course, any additional delay related to the IT contract might have been avoided if District staff didn’t try to play it too cute by half in the first place.

Or, actually, the 73% of the total contract price that the $80,000 of hardware represents.

But at the Board’s November 5, 2015 meeting, staff – primarily Finance Supt. Sandra DeAngelus, with a little help from Somera – came up with what sure sounded like a half-baked (at most) attempt at backfilling the omitted due diligence to justify the District’s original decision to give the whole deal to Sikitch, without bidding the approximately $80,000 hardware/software portion.

You can watch and listen to it starting at around the 10 minute mark of the meeting video, and continuing through the vote at the 17:43 mark.

As best as we can tell from that discussion, Somera got an incomplete (or inadequately detailed) product list from Sikitch and made some attempt to contact three suppliers, only one of which appears to have responded in whatever time frame was set. That alternate supplier’s bid was $20,000 higher than Sikitch’s, although it does not sound like an apples-to-apples situation because, among other things, Sikitch proposed a hardware-based firewall while the other vendor chose a software-based one.

Not surprisingly, only one Board member questioned that apples-to-oranges choice: Rick Biagi.

But by that point the charade was convincing enough for the other six Board members to approve the pre-cooked deal with “best boy” Sikitch by a vote of 6-1.

And the no-bid scams continue.

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