To the editor:

It was a real free for all at the council meeting this week as Burch and Brandt stood back to back against the rest on council. Tim Day led the charge for a new police headquarters due to the deterioration of the old police building. Mrs. Bertolini put Balfour Beatty on the table at warp speed. City staff started the process some years back and the end result was a $110 million fiasco that went down the chute when the residents put a stop to the insanity. The McGarvey building, an option put forth by the public safety committee, was stuck in the mud and abruptly taken off the table. Mrs. Bertolini managed to get an offer from Balfour Beatty put on the docket in a matter of days rather then a matter of years.

It was maddening as you watched Mr. Brandt and Mr. Burch attempting to get some competition into the process of procurement. The “Manager at Risk Faction” had the edge and stopped them cold even though it would have taken only a few weeks to put the project out to bid. Old habits are hard to break, especially since the city staff appears to be addicted to the most expensive way of doing business. What we have here is a culture that is used to eating through money faster than termites can burn through a hay stack. There is no forethought here, the administration knows one thing best and that is spend spend and spend. The mayor and some of the council members don’t seem to understand this yet. If Pete and Jim stay on course they will eventually bring some common sense into the process and we should see prices drop precipitously.

The administration only seems to know one way of doing business. There doesn’t appear to be any procurement apparatus in place. The manager-at-risk contracts are pretty sketchy and it is not apparent what we are paying for in the way of internals. One of our residents discovered the city was paying $700 to $900 per door for mounting hardware in our fire stations.

Councilman Grill swung and swayed like a palm tree in the wind while the mayor was able to manipulate Balfour to drop the price by $1 million in short order. This makes you wonder if the price was inflated to begin with. The other side of the coin is that a good business person doesn’t start from a place that there isn’t a bit of room for negotiation but we will never know if that was the case or if there was more room.

In any event, Pete Brandt and Jim Burch had it right and it will be interesting to see if more offers are put on the table to build the police administration building. Who knows, maybe we can find a whole other way to do business in the city. We need to open the bid process and bring some competition into the mix in order to get the prices down to a rational level. Right now it looks like a closed club with little or no competition. It may be very difficult to inspire companies to come in here to compete unless we demonstrate that we are changing our ways of doing business.

Jim Burch has led the charge on this and appears to be a natural born leader. He has been criticized by some but I believe we should recognize the contribution this gentleman is making while trying to get things done in a more economically efficient manner. It would behoove the mayor and some of the other council members to jump on his train because he seems to be the most aggressive cost cutter we have sitting on the dais. The price reduction on the new fire station proves that he knows what he is doing.



John Sullivan

Cape Coral Minutemen