When Lloy Glover and Jane Quick bid on fee offices, they had no reason to believe they wouldn't be given a fair shot. Jay Nixon had implemented a "competitive" bidding system, designed to subjectively evaluate and assign scores for proposals. It was supposed to be a big change from the way things were run before.
They formed Glover & Quick, Inc. to present their bids. With 29 years of experience working in fee offices between them, they should have been serious competitors. But as it turns out, they shouldn't have even bothered.
They ran up against James Ryan Williams twice and lost both times. James Ryan Williams is a politically connected Nixon donor whose inexplicable success in the bidding process has led to complaints from both sides of the aisle. In the words of David Peironnet, a Democrat who also went up against Williams, "It was as rigged as it can get."
William's success was enough to catch the attention of the Associated Press, who found that James Ryan Williams revised his Best and Final Offer for most of his bids to reduce the amount of money returned to the state (one of five scoring criteria). And yet he still won every time. The bidding process is supposed to be blind, so Williams shouldn't have been able to know how well his competitors were doing. How then, could he have known it was safe to reduce his bids?
In at least one case, it wasn't – or shouldn’t have been. Jane Quick and Lloy Glover put together a better bid for the Gladstone fee office. But a mysterious discrepancy resulted in Glover & Quick being penalized 8 points, enough for Williams to pull ahead and win the lucrative Gladstone office.
How do we know this happened?
One part of the bid assessment is "Personnel Qualifications, Financial Stability & Past Performance/Experience". Jane Quick and Lloy Glover submitted identical personnel plans for their bids in Liberty and Gladstone. They would, pending a background check and other vetting processes, maintain all of the current staff at the two offices.
In their bid for Liberty, they got 28 of 30 points. In their bid for Gladstone, they got 20 out of 30 points. A difference of 8 points for the exact same answers, when no other bidders were penalized for indicating their desire to retain the current staff.
They lost Gladstone by 4.13 points, because of a score that was completely out of line with how other bidders were being treated.
It wasn't, as we initially suspected, a difference of opinion between two different groups of bid evaluators. The same evaluators gave high scores to bidders who offered virtually the same response as Jane Quick and Lloy Glover. Their rationale for striking down the most competitive bid would have escaped us completely, if we weren't already aware of the suspicious circumstances surrounding the fee office bids.
Quick and Glover deserved to win the Gladstone fee office based on the merits of their bid, but it was denied to them on an arbitrary basis, and to the benefit of a Nixon crony. Does anyone still believe that this system is fair and impartial?
They formed Glover & Quick, Inc. to present their bids. With 29 years of experience working in fee offices between them, they should have been serious competitors. But as it turns out, they shouldn't have even bothered.
They ran up against James Ryan Williams twice and lost both times. James Ryan Williams is a politically connected Nixon donor whose inexplicable success in the bidding process has led to complaints from both sides of the aisle. In the words of David Peironnet, a Democrat who also went up against Williams, "It was as rigged as it can get."
William's success was enough to catch the attention of the Associated Press, who found that James Ryan Williams revised his Best and Final Offer for most of his bids to reduce the amount of money returned to the state (one of five scoring criteria). And yet he still won every time. The bidding process is supposed to be blind, so Williams shouldn't have been able to know how well his competitors were doing. How then, could he have known it was safe to reduce his bids?
In at least one case, it wasn't – or shouldn’t have been. Jane Quick and Lloy Glover put together a better bid for the Gladstone fee office. But a mysterious discrepancy resulted in Glover & Quick being penalized 8 points, enough for Williams to pull ahead and win the lucrative Gladstone office.
How do we know this happened?
One part of the bid assessment is "Personnel Qualifications, Financial Stability & Past Performance/Experience". Jane Quick and Lloy Glover submitted identical personnel plans for their bids in Liberty and Gladstone. They would, pending a background check and other vetting processes, maintain all of the current staff at the two offices.
In their bid for Liberty, they got 28 of 30 points. In their bid for Gladstone, they got 20 out of 30 points. A difference of 8 points for the exact same answers, when no other bidders were penalized for indicating their desire to retain the current staff.
They lost Gladstone by 4.13 points, because of a score that was completely out of line with how other bidders were being treated.
It wasn't, as we initially suspected, a difference of opinion between two different groups of bid evaluators. The same evaluators gave high scores to bidders who offered virtually the same response as Jane Quick and Lloy Glover. Their rationale for striking down the most competitive bid would have escaped us completely, if we weren't already aware of the suspicious circumstances surrounding the fee office bids.
Quick and Glover deserved to win the Gladstone fee office based on the merits of their bid, but it was denied to them on an arbitrary basis, and to the benefit of a Nixon crony. Does anyone still believe that this system is fair and impartial?
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