City of Tacoma staff is standing by its decision to select a Canadian business to upgrade the city’s website, despite frustration that local companies were rejected.
“I would have loved for a local firm to be top-ranked,” said city spokesman Rob McNair-Huff, who led the team that awarded Toronto-based Intrafinity the job. “We can’t use whether the firm is local or not as one of the criteria. State purchasing laws don’t allow us to do that.”
McNair-Huff said Monday that his team took the extra step of having the process reviewed by the city’s legal department. He also pointed out that no businesses appealed the decision.
The two Tacoma-based finalists said Monday that appeals are allowed only for procedural defects and not substantive problems in the proposal. Both Topia Technology CEO Janine Terrano and SiteCrafting President Brian Forth said they thought the city’s to-do list could have been improved.
“I think they had good elements in the requirements. I certainly don’t think it was complete,” Terrano said.
Forth said his team “had some difficulty determining exactly what we were going after here.”
“I want to be fair to the city. We really looked at it in terms of, if this were our website, what would we do?” Forth said. “This isn’t about us losing. This is about me knowing that there are companies in Tacoma that can do this work.”
McNair-Huff said he understood that frustration. On a point scale of 1 to 30, Intrafinity ranked 25. SiteCrafting was second at 20.7, and Topia subsidiary Business Internet Services in partnership with Rusty George ranked fourth at 18. According to the city, SiteCrafting’s bid of $126,500 was twice that of Intrafinity, though Forth has disputed the number.
“Ultimately we want to get the best product for the public at the lowest price, because we’re trying to be responsible with taxpayer dollars,” McNair-Huff said.
Updating the city’s website to improve community relations has been a goal of the City Council for several years. Former City Manager Eric Anderson was criticized in his performance review for not making it a priority. The council set a goal to “redo (the) website entirely” by June 30, 2012.
McNair-Huff said Monday that the site is outdated. It was installed in 2006, based on older technology from Topia subsidiary BIS, and the city didn’t pay for ongoing maintenance. Now some things just don’t work.
For example, the online calendar ended in 2010. Anyone updating web pages must use programming code to do tasks normally accomplished by clicking a button. And the site’s search function is notoriously bad, rarely returning relevant results.
The site also must become compliant with federal rules mandating access for people with disabilities.
The city budgeted $350,000 for a website upgrade when it believed it would use Microsoft SharePoint, which runs the city’s internal site. Microsoft licensing costs contributed to most of that amount. But then city staff decided to consider everything, resulting in 13 bids to do the work for much less. Intrafinity’s contract will be between $65,000 and $70,000, with annual maintenance fees of $5,000.
Tansy Hayward, acting deputy city manager, said Monday that the website upgrade was among a “suite of complimentary improvements,” including a web portal run by the economic development department created in response to City Council direction.
“They were proceeding from the business community, which said they wanted something separate, streamlined and highly customized,” she said. A $20,000 contract has been issued to a Tacoma team of Data Imagery and Rusty George.
Meanwhile, Illinois-based WebQA is developing a tool so residents can log issues, complaints and requests, then receive follow-up responses. That contract was $37,140, began in July and is up for renewal in November 2012. And a $27,000 one-year contract was issued to Minnesota-based GovDelivery for subscription email alerts.
Why not roll all these upgrades into one project?
“We know there’s a better, cheaper, more effective tool that exists” for each purpose, Hayward said.
Kathleen Cooper: 253-597-8546
kathleen.cooper@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/business
Twitter: @KCooperTNT
Staff writer Lewis Kamb contributed to this report.
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