Mayor Vincent Gray’s top aide asked procurement officials in November to skip open bidding and approve an agreement with a nonprofit organization to coordinate the One City Summit, a city document shows.
In the document, buried within the website of the Office of Contracting and Procurement, Gray’s chief of staff urges D.C.’s top procurement officer to approve an agreement between the District and America Speaks even though officials did not solicit other bids.
The document — a form titled “Determination and Findings for a Sole Source Procurement” — is used when officials want to sign off on a contract without going through the standard bidding process. D.C. law requires that the agency requesting the expenditures justify waiving bidding procedures.
| To attend |
| > The One City Summit on Feb. 11. For information, go to onecitysummit.dc.gov or call 202-709-5132. Registration is free. |
“America Speaks has the ability to facilitate a summit … with limited start-up time,” Chris Murphy, Gray’s top aide, wrote in his explanation. “No other vendor has the capacity to provide the full scale planning and implementation of a large scale citizen summit of this magnitude by the required deadline.”
A spokeswoman for the Office of Contracting and Procurement, Lauren Stephens, said the findings were published for comment, as mandated by law, for a 10-day period that began on Nov. 23. Stephens said no one objected to the proposal to skip bidding, and the request was approved.
America Speaks coordinated D.C. citizen summits during the Anthony Williams administration — experience that Murphy also used to justify the award. The organization, backed by an advisory board stocked with Democratic and Republican luminaries, has also planned citizen gatherings in other major cities.
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“The number of organizations … in the field of participatory democracy is relatively small, and there are very few in our region that have that as a primary or exclusive focus,” America Speaks Chief Operating Officer Steve Brigham said in an email to The Washington Examiner. “We are the only one, however, locally or nationally, that conducts deliberative events at the scale and complexity we do.”
The size of an event, Brigham said, matters.
“Most public meetings are usually in the dozens, and very often no larger than 100 or so. Our average meeting is probably 500,” he wrote. “Once you exceed 100 people, on average, it becomes exceedingly difficult to hold a productive public meeting without the use of sophisticated technology and sophisticated process. We have expertise in both.”
Gray, who ran for mayor on a “One City” agenda, has described the gathering as “a frank and open conversation” that will include small-group discussions and votes, using some of America Speaks’ hand-held technology, to help determine District priorities for 2012. His office estimated the cost of the meeting to be $600,000, which officials said will be paid through a combination of private and public funding.
