TimminsToday has received the following letter to the editor from Logan McMeekin on behalf of the Timmins Taxpayers Association.
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There will be some big savings for taxpayers with the recycling contract recently being awarded to a local company, NES. We will not only be saving $7 per tonne, but we will also be saving approximately $20,000 per month in freight charges that we used to have to pay to ship to Sudbury.
We are left to wonder why this process has taken so long?
This was brought up in Council meetings last year. Our contract with the Sudbury recycling center was up in August of last year and yet the contract to NES was just awarded this week.
That means that we have spent nine months shipping our recycling to Sudbury, paying more per tonne and freight charges when we potentially could have been supporting a local company and saving big money. The savings in freight alone over the last eight months would be approximately $160,000.
This is not the first time that we have seen a problem with our Request For Proposal (RFP) process.
The Connecting Link project has been sole sourced. The snowplowing contract was also so specific that we ended up with one bid.
It is time to address the problems that we are having with the RFP process and review the criteria to ensure that we are getting the best deal that we can while ensuring we are not putting ourselves in a dangerous position of having to accept a bid because there is only one company that can meet our stringent criteria.
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