Sanchez asks about reopening RFP when a carter cannot fulfill an award
Sanchez presses whether DSNY would be open to amending the process so that if a carter cannot fulfill its promises, the RFP is reopened for bidding. Anderson explains that where open slots exist, DSNY does issue new RFPs, and describes the Staten Island situation where the subcontractor became the prime after acquisition.
Is there a world or would it complicate more things?
I think one of the frustrations that the Staten Island businesses are feeling is for that third RFP, folks are feeling like, well, once that company is gone, why didn't we get a chance to then all bid for it again?
Because there are six different carters that already exist on Staten Island.
Why couldn't I throw my hat in the ring to try and get that now that this person is not doing it?
Would you be open to amending the process of the...
If a Carter cannot fulfill its promises that we open up the RFP process committed directly to the agreed upon contract already, just folks get to bid if they want that contract or would that add a crazy
level layer to the process?
Yeah, I don't know that we would necessarily be able to
to implement rules like that.
I think that the kinds of merger and acquisition
activity that we've seen in the industry are actually a net positive for the industry because we are seeing that well-capitalized companies that are able to invest in new technology, able to invest in cleaner trucks, able to invest in
really advanced worker safety training, are making investments by purchasing other companies.
And I think that's exactly the kind of thing that we want to see in the industry for it to
grow and develop and become more sophisticated compared to the industry of the old days, particularly when we started to study the industry.
There are places where if two companies that are already given awards in a zone merge together and there's no other eligible carters that responded to the RFP,
where there may be an open slot, and in that case, we will bid out that open slot.
We are doing that right now in two zones, and I think RFP responses came back a few weeks ago.
We're in the process of evaluating those, and we'll have new awards in the future.
Local Law 199 gives the department pretty broad discretion on how to
how to decide when and where to fill zones.
We can either assign the zone contract to an existing carter, we can do a new RFP, we can go back to the list of carters that previously had bid on the zone.
And I think if you look at the original RFP for the Staten Island zone, we had five carters bid on that zone.
One of the five carters, who's
in the back row of this room, already had 15 zones, so they weren't eligible under the language of the law.
The other four carters, one of them was priority, the other one was century, century bought priority, so they would have been the next in line to get the zone anyway.
So I think any way you wanna sort of
slice it, you know, I think we followed the appropriate procedure here and we are confident that Staten Island businesses will get the service they deserve.
Thank you.
I'd like to recognize that we've also been joined by Councilmember Ong and I would like to turn it over to Councilmember Maloney for questions.