Alien paragraph infiltrating RFP blamed for procurement angst in Salt Lake City

An alien paragraph that infiltrated the RFP was at the root of problems with Utah DOT's procurement for a toll system for the  I-15 HOT Lanes, officials say. Glenn Deitiker, president of Telvent Caseta says his company believed they'd won the contract when the prices were announced. That's because the Instructions to Proposers or RFP contained a now famous "ten percent clause" that was never meant to be there - but they didn't know.

Telvent's price was $8.09m and the 10% clause said that only proposals within ten percent of that (up to $8.90m) could be compared for "best value selection." Next price was ETC at $10.7m, and then came TransCore at $11.25m.

Yet TransCore got the job.

UDOT says selection was based on a scoring of the technical quality of the proposals as follows:

1. TransCore = Good +

2. ETC = Acceptable +

3. Telvent = Acceptable -

A 60/40 weighting of the technical quality scoring over price gave the contract to TransCore.

Utah DOT didn't apply the ten percent clause because it was never intended to be there.

And they say, they didn't even know it was lurking there until Telvent pointed it out after TransCore had been announced the winner.

Philip Ellsworth, contract administrator on the procurement described what happened in an email:

"The statement regarding 'each proposal within approximately ten (10) percent of the lowest Price Proposal' was a boilerplate (standard template) statement that was not removed from the RFP when we used it to create the HOT Lanes RFP.  

"This (ten percent clause) is UDOT's standard practice regarding best value Design-Build proposals and was inadvertently left in the document when it should have been completely replaced by the preceding statement describing the 40/60 weighting of the price and technical scores.  

"Unfortunately, this was not noticed by the Department or the proposers until Telvent pointed it out after the selection had been made.  If it had been noticed by the Department, or if a proposer had pointed it out, then the Department would have issued an addendum at that time."

A careless cut & paste no one caught

One explanation is that the alien ten percent clause was the result of a careless cut and paste job by a person unknown.

Telvent say they "discussed the issues" afterwards with UDOT, which probably means there were some angry words.

But Glenn Deitiker says they decided it was best not to press a formal appeal and simply to "put it behind us and move on."

UDOT's contract administrator Ellsworth says the proposers themselves share some of the blame.

He says the rules required proposers to notify UDOT in writing during the procurement process of any error or ambiguity in the RFP, and no one did. He says the 60/40 quality over price clause was emphasized in all the presentations.

see earlier reports:

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/4360

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/4368

TOLLROADSnews 2009-09-27