The San Jose Mercury News reports that the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has written a detailed 33-page request for bids for — wait for it — cake.
VTA needs the cakes for the three dozen or so retirement parties it holds each year (it should be a lot more). To submit a bid, a bakery must be willing to provide any of eleven flavors (do you want peach or marble?), sixteen fillings (pumpkin or mint cream?), five icings (butter cream or cream cheese?), and six toppings (jimmies or walnuts?). Plus the cakes have to be decorated with flowers, streamers, or other ornaments.
Possible major risks cheap cialis https://regencygrandenursing.com/product5840.html associated with bariatric weight loss surgery brings about an effective resolution from the following conditions, Type 2 diabetes is linked to Morbid obesity and is a serious and life-threatening disease. Second, without men coming forward, the underlying causes of sexual dysfunctions may be cialis order on line age. Tight clothing overnight generic viagra increases the temperature of the scrotal region, which can cause infertility due to improper production of testosterone. Even today in this post-modernist world, Special needs pharmacy cialis children are marginalised where they are denied of the rights and education that they are entitled to. For some reason, no San Jose bakery bid on this potentially valuable contract. If just one had bid, say, $1,000 per cake, they would have been the low bidder and VTA, which is in hot competition for the title of “worst transit agency of the decade,” might have given them the contract as the low bidder.
Since they didn’t get any bids, says VTA’s general manager, they will just go to the bakeries and buy the cakes off the shelf when they need them.
But you have to think: No wonder VTA has lost more than a third of its transit riders since 2001 since its personnel are busy performing such vital tasks as writing 33-page requests for proposals for party cakes.
The 33 pp consist of normal bid specs. This project specifications are 2 pages, plus samples pf past purchases.
Maybe the false outrage could be justified if one were to find, say, a RFP for fleet cars that was, oh, 8pp.
Instead, this is a paper trail for oversight so free marketeers like Halliburton, KBR, Enron and other well-connected no-bidders don’t make off with the public’s money like we are so familiar with.
IOW, this is a layer on the cake, so to speak, so your money doesn’t get stolen. Welcome to America. I’m sure there are many places in, say, Africa with less paperwork.
DS
A no-bid contract is “making off with the public’s money”, but the cost of funding a bureaucracy that has sufficient excess personnel to make 33 page RFPs for cake (or indeed, an RFP of *any* size for a cake) is not an example of making off with the public’s money? How disgustingly biased of you.
I’m so sorry if my pointing out the very obvious fact that the briefest, most cursory reading of the RFP showed most pages were standard to all bids, and this pointing out the obvious made it look like I’m biased to you. I guess there’s no refuting some things in some people’s minds, is there?
The obvious point is that most of the pages weren’t made for this bid.
They were already made.
They existed already.
They are standard.
They get stuck in all bids.
People type/paste in stuff in the blanks specific to the bid.
Pages with nothing to type specific to the bid (e.g. the exhibit H) don’t get typed. They get copied or pdf’d.
IOW: most of the pages required little if no work, because they are submitted with every RFP.
Hope this helps.
DS
“IOW, this is a layer on the cake, so to speak, so your money doesn’t get stolen. Welcome to America. I’m sure there are many places in, say, Africa with less paperwork.”
In America, people like me think that when money is taken from folks without their consent, it has been stolen. I don’t see how contracts like these put an end to that. A little less of what has been stolen goes into producing the contract, but when coercive government takes from those who would rather choose there own cakes and transportation, it only serves to make America more like Africa.