As Chair of the Contracts Committee in the New York City Council, Ben Kallos oversaw an annual contracts budget of more than $20 billion. You might find your small business represented through a breakdown by industry for human services (40%), much of which goes to faith-based and secular non-profits, $8.3 billion (27%) for standard services, $3.8 billion (13%) for professional services, $3.1 billion (10%) for goods, $2.4 billion (8%) for construction, and $800 million (2%) for architecture and engineering.
Prior to this role, Ben chaired the Committee on Governmental Operations, which oversees the powerful yet little known Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which administers $1.2 billion in city procurement including $173 million in PPE, manages 1.9 million square feet of private office space, the largest municipal fleet in the country with 30,000 vehicles, as well as 27.8 trillion BTU in energy purchases along with energy efficiency improvements at 515 facilities.
In chairing both committees, Ben have gained a unique understanding of billions of dollars in city contracts, from the top level, down to the agency, and even in some case down to individual items. We can help you and your company find new opportunities for growth, and help you bid on hundreds of thousands if not millions in city contracts.
City Record Online – Local Law 38 of 2014
New York City is required to publish public notices for various government actions, the most relevant of which would be related to procurement including solicitations, intent to award, award, as well as pre-qualified vendor lists. Rather than publishing notices in newspapers or relevant trade publications, the City of New York publishes its own newspaper called the City Record. When Ben was elected, interested parties needed to pay $75 for a subscription for a physical paper copy to be delivered to them, then read through pages and pages to find anything relevant. In practice, city agencies go through the motions of publishing, then only invite specific vendors to bid on any given contract. As of 2021, the average number of bidders per contract is only 4.
As Chair of the Governmental Operations Committee Ben Kallos authored Local Law 38 of 2014 to create the City Record Online. Our firm will use the system Ben created to track New York City procurement with you in order make sure you know about relevant opportunities as well as awards to competitors.
Requests for Proposals
Solicitations by government agencies are often written with a specific vendor in mind. A request for proposal may include requirements that preclude certain vendors from bidding that often has no valid relationship with the underlying contract. As a Council Member, Ben Kallos have weighed in on contracts for the selection of ferry operators, parks, and voting machines.
When Ben Kallos was first elected in 2014, he was surprised to learn that he would have to pay for a Westlaw subscription in order to get access to the laws that he was responsible for amending. Furthermore, while the city had an existing repository of laws online, it was not updated regularly, and the publisher required a license in order to use or republish the materials. Ben immediately co-sponsored and passed Local Law 37 of 2014 to require the city to publish the law online without any license restriction and syndication of our laws. When the City Law Department put out the original Request for Proposals it included a provision relating to the resale of city laws which not only favored the incumbent publisher, but was against the new law Ben had passed. Not only that but the RFP was not widely circulated, in fact a vendor that Ben knew was interested in bidding on the project had missed the deadline. Ben immediately brought the fatal flaw in the RFP to the attention of the Law Department and forced them to issue a new RFP that dropped the invalid requirement. The vendor that had promised to actually set the law free ended up winning the contract and you can now find and even bulk download all of New York City laws.
We can work with small businesses even before you go through the costly and burdensome bid process to ensure that the solicitation is written in a way that is neutral so that you have a fair shot at competing for and winning city and state contracts.
Procurement and Sourcing Solutions Portal (PASSPort)
As Chair of the Contracts Committee, Ben Kallos, oversaw the New York City’s transition from the Vendor Information Exchange System (VENDEX) to the Procurement and Sourcing Solutions Portal (PASSPort). The new PASSPort system is becoming an end to end platform starting from bid and award, to hosting the lengthy compliance process, to managing invoice and payment. While notices are still required to be published in the City Record, they are also now being posted on PASSPort with notices sent to vendors with existing accounts whose profiles indicate relevant skill, service, or commodity codes.
When Ben became Contracts Chair, he was surprised to learn that access to PASSPort was difficult to obtain with information within the system restricted. Ben worked with the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services to open PASSPort to the public and importantly other vendors who can now see more information through a public access portal.
Our firm can use the public access portal to help you obtain information you need about existing contracts as your condier new opportunities.
Minority and Woman-owned Business Enterprises (M/WBE)
As Chair of the Contracts Committee, Ben Kallos focused on working with Minority and Woman-owned Business Enterprises (M/WBE). New York City provides businesses of a certain size owned by women and people of color a preference in obtaining contracts through its MWBE program. Due to Constitutional strict scrutiny requirements the program is narrowly tailored. An independent study periodically studies the number of businesses owned by women and people of color and compares it to the utilization of those businesses to determine if there is a disparity.
Asian American owned professional service providers such as architects and engineers had started out as covered by the City’s initial MWBE program but had been phased out following the 2009 study when there was no longer a finding of a disparity. However, the most recent study showed that in the absence of an MWBE preference a disparity had reemerged. As Chair and Council Member, Ben Kallos worked with the Alliance of New York Asian Architects and Engineers to pass Local Law 174 of 2019 out of the committee to restore their MWBE preference.
Our firm is eager to help your small business obtain MWBE certification, identify RFPs and prime contractors to business with, and to help you win a representative share of the city and state contract spending.
Contract Disputes
As a Council Member and Chair of the Contracts Committee, Ben Kallos have weighed in on multiple contracts disputes, often working with private sector partners to deliver better services for the city.
Ben was an early booster of LinkNYC’s free wireless and phone service kiosks. LinkNYC is operated by CityBridge, which is a subsidiary of Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google. When few of the LinkNYC tablets that are used to make free phone calls worked, Ben identified communications protocols and designed a platform to monitor service levels in real time. Later on, Ben was particularly disappointed when CityBridge not only failed to make payments, but failed to continue their roll out, as they renegotiated a 2-year extension on their contract. Ben continued to advocate to substitute performance for contractual payments to the city, including in a white-paper I authored with now-Mayor Eric Adams.
In Summer 2020, Mayor de Blasio promised $55 million in free air conditioners to low-income seniors sheltering in place. When residents complained throughout the summer that they hadn’t received their air conditioners, Ben Kallos pulled the contracts for every vendor. The first thing Ben found was that the city was paying one vendor above market rate, as much as $549 for air conditioners and another $203 for installation for a total of $752. At the same time, Ben found that another vendor was only charging $329 for an air conditioner and installation. Working with the Daily News, we found that the lower cost vendor had initially received the bulk of the order only to be forced to drop out of the program because they kept getting incorrect information from the city on where to deliver the air conditioners.
Our firm can help your company navigate your contract so that you can not only get paid but deliver for the people of our city and state.
Environmentally Preferable Purchasing – Local Laws 111 & 112 of 2021
Originally adopted in 2005, Environmentally Preferable Purchasing sets minimum standards for the purchase of goods over $100,000. However, as of today, the law is applied to few if any contracts, and was completely ignored by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who actually wrote the original law. The legislation Ben Kallos authored and passed through the Council modernizes standards including adoption of EPEAT for technology products and expands the law to cover furniture and textiles. It also forces the city to report on contract solicitations subject to the law. Where an item that should be, is not subjected to the law, the city must engage in a waiver process, that has rarely ever happened.
If your company uses environmentally preferred materials, our firm can help force the city to follow the law so that we can win for you, the city, and our planet.
