Friday, January 6, 2012
Guv'ment Atlanta airport concessions score sheets released
Posted by Thomas Wheatley @thomaswheatley on Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 4:12 PM
Gather 'round, lawyers, lobbyists, and spurned airport vendors! Mayor Kasim Reed has released the score sheets for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport's concessions program.
We're poring over the data in search of interesting nuggets. (Here's a refresher on which firms bid evaluators recommended occupy space at the world's busiest airport.) Let us know if you discover anything.
Comments (6)
Showing 1-6 of 6
Off the cuff:
1. It looks like every single bid that was scored got full credit for being "Disadvantaged Busness (sic) Enterprise Goal". Which MAY mean that either those criteria are very loosely defined, some fudging of the corporate structure took place, or only disadvantaged(?) firms bid.
2. Everyone was scored the same as far as financial offer, which leads me to believe this was not a high bidder process.
3. Financial capability was weighted very lightly which means risk aversion was not an important criteria.
Its hard to tell unless one knows what the criteria actually mean so much of what I think is pure conjecture. But it looks like the scoring was based more on personal preferences than what would provide the city with the most low risk income. (which can be either good or bad depending on how you look at it).
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While I'm playing investigative gadfly, here is the firm with one of the highest overall scores:
www.hbfairports.com
And:
http://projects.ajc.com/gallery/view/metro…
So we're never going to learn how much money the airport left on the table by going with the campaign donors rather than with the highest bidders?
Sure, the highest bid may not always be the best, if quality is awful and / or the bidder is incompetent and may go broke. But the right process would have started with the assumption that highest bid wins unless the difference in bids is small or there's some major factor like high probability of bankruptcy.
Are the "evaluators" the ones who made the final decisions? Or did the evaluators offer suggestions and others made the final decisions? Has the City's decision making process for the airport bid process been released; if not, will it be?
The city council made the final decisions. You can see the process in action on the city's tv station or by going to the council meetings. Not sure how you can see them after the fact. Perhaps the city's tv station has a "greatest hits" program. Of course if you're into conspiracy theories, those decisions were made in a smokey back alley. In that case you'll just have to use your imagination.
Question for Cityzen: were none of the losers campaign contributors or would we still be in this "they contributed money so it must have been corrupt" rut regardless of who won? As far as money left on the table goes, I believe the numbers are in the bids if you want to crunch the numbers. Ideally no one who does business with the government would be able to make campaign contributions to those making the decisions but the Supreme Court has decided money = free speech so there isn't much you can do except wait decades for the court to change or lead the charge for a constitutional amendment.
Centennian: Or they could go with Common Causes' eminently sensible suggestion to pass legislation that limits contributions from those doing business with the city to $250.00. But that would go against Il Duce's (aka Baby Kasim) dictate to the council that anyone who voted against the concessions would feel the full weight of his campaign coffers in getting them ousted from their seats. He doesn't need a back- alley. He just needs a cellphone.
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