How Legislators Can Help Our Schools, by Phil Hemingway

Legislators can help every taxpayer and provide more money for schools without having to allocate any more money.

Presently, Iowa school districts are not bound by any code or state law which requires them to competitively bid service contracts. Individual Districts may have board policies that require competitive bidding, but there is no state statute requiring competitive bidding. This leaves taxpayers and students vulnerable to the whims of individual school boards and administrators.

The Iowa City Community School District’s board policy does not require competitive bidding for service contracts. Routinely, millions of dollars of public funds are allocated to a few service providers without a formal bidding process allowing more vendors to compete.

Service contracts should be required to meet the same bidding protocol the state provides for public improvement or construction contracts. Public improvement contracts (construction) are obligated to meet Iowa Code Section 26.3(1) requiring any construction project estimated to cost more  than $125,000.00 to be advertised for sealed bids by publishing a notice to bidders. The notice to bidders shall be published at least once, not less than four (4) and not more than 45 days before the date for filing bids, in a newspaper published at least once weekly and having a general circulation in the geographic area served by the governmental entity.

The monetary threshold for service contracts should be lowered to $25,000.00.

Competition for these service contracts will protect taxpayers from the kind of no-bid Halliburton type contracts where only one company gets the work. A lack of competition tends to lead to a lack of accountability for the quality of work done, projects done and redone at $100,000 a pop, cost overruns, and a failure to enforce late fees written into contracts and clearly enforceable but not enforced, all issues that we have seen in past work done by private contractors for the Iowa City Community School District and all costs absorbed by district taxpayers, not the contractors.

Competition will save taxpayers money and will provide a more transparent and open process. We look to our elected officials like Senators Bolkcom, Dvorsky, and Greiner; as well as Representatives Jacoby, Kaufmann, Lensing, Mascher, and Stutsman to provide this needed reform of required bidding for school service contracts.

The momentum to move such a required bidding law would require our Iowa legislators to say NO to a strong lobby financially supported by some private sector providers who have a virtual monopoly in some Iowa communities. By doing so, legislators would be providing every Iowa child greater assurance that Iowans’ tax dollars are better spent meeting their needs. We must stretch every dollar as far as possible as construction and maintenance costs continue to rise.

There must be a mechanism that will force those who will not seek competition to do so. Taxpayers and our students deserve it.

Please help us make this happen.

Phil Hemingway

Iowa City