May 06, 2003
City Bureau Recommends Taking Garage Contract Away from Portland Business Alliance
Well, the first decision has been made in the process to select who gets to SmartPark contract. The city's Bureau of General Services (whose website is next-to-useless, by the way) announced yesterday that it intended to award the contract to a coalition of Star Park and the African American, Hispanic Metropolitan and Philippine American chambers of commerce.
To get a general overview, let's start with today's Tribune coverage:
Alliance spokesman John Czarobski said they won?t consider it final until the council votes on the contract. The parking contract makes up about 30 percent of the alliance's budget, he said.
"It's premature to say if it would affect our budget or cause layoffs," he said. "We hope City Council would look at what is in the best interests of downtown."
The council can either accept the recommendation or make its own, possibly as early as its May 21 meeting.
For the details, we'll have to turn to today's Oregonian:
The evaluation committee of citizens and city officials gave the Star Park proposal a score of 91.4 out of 100. The Portland Business Alliance proposal scored 88.1.
...
The business alliance proposal scored slightly higher in one of the five categories -- staff experience. The Star Park proposal scored slightly higher in the most heavily weighted category -- cost/financial benefit -- as well as references and firm experience
The biggest difference between the two proposals came in the category with the least weight -- diversity. Star Park, together with the African American, Filipino and Hispanic chambers of commerce, scored 9.1 out of 10 in that category; the business alliance got 6.7.
The Portland City Council will take up the recommendation as early as May 21, presuming no protest is filed by the PBA in the meantime. And what will happpen when it's before the City Council? Well, according to Phil Stanford back over in today's Tribune:
Next week, when the matter comes before the City Council, it'll be the first time since approximately the invention of the horseless carriage that anyone besides the Portland Business Alliance has had a shot at managing the city-owned SmartPark lots. ... "It was so wired before," says one knowledgeable insider. "No one else even tried." ... Count on Vera Katz and Erik Sten to support the upstart Alliance of Minority Chambers against the PBA -- which means they're still one vote shy of breaking the longtime monopoly.
Interestingly, Stanford's insider uses the same word to describe the prior contract situation -- "wired" -- as does Star Park President Barry Schlesinger in the Tribune story linked above. But then, Schlesinger would certainly count as a knowledgeable insider. Or, one supposes, the PBA rivals for this contract are all looking at the same set of talking points.