Editorial: Beware of wading too far into bid process, Dallas City Council

Closed bids are just good business, and they are especially good business when it comes to lucrative government contracts.

That’s why we need to be attentive to the Dallas City Council’s decision Wednesday to postpone a vote on a contract worth millions of dollars for the collection of overdue fines.

City staff recommended granting a contract to a firm called MSB Government Services. With only one vote in dissent, council members instead voted to have staff brief them on exactly how collections work and offer some insight into the bid process.

There’s nothing wrong with that on its face. As council member Rick Callahan rightly noted, no one on the staff briefed him about the contract, and he wanted to know more about it. It’s a council member’s responsibility to be informed about a vote.

The problem with this particular contract, though, is the political freight it carries.

Collections are a difficult business, but they are important to the city for a number of reasons.

Too often, people who get tickets in Dallas ignore them. The fines, charged through the municipal courts, are a punishment for breaking the city’s laws. Those laws are there to keep us safe.

If people don’t take the fines seriously, they aren’t taking the law seriously, and that can be dangerous.

But the city doesn’t have the ability to chase down everyone who refuses to cough up what they owe, so the business is contracted out.

For the last 12 years, the company that has held the contract is the law firm Linebarger, Goggan, Blair and Sampson. DeMetris Sampson, a partner in the firm, has been involved in local politics, and particularly southern Dallas politics, for a long time. She regularly donates to council members and candidates.

That puts an inevitable shadow on some council members’ concerns about this particular contract.

Linebarger clearly wants to maintain the collections deal it has with City Hall, so much so that its managing partner, Bridget Lopez, came to the council to speak in defense of

Linebarger’s work for the city.

It’s important to remember, though, that the staff recommended MSB after scoring a series of closed bids. MSB finished first, far ahead of any other bidder. Linebarger finished third.

Now that the results are in, a number of council members are questioning the bid process.

MSB’s offer appears much better than any other bid the city received. The company guaranteed payment of more than $21 million to the city over the next three years. Linebarger’s guarantee was $300,000.

At this point, everyone’s cards are on the table. The bids are unsealed. That skews the system.

The council is not wrong to take a closer look at this contract. But it would be wise to heed the advice of Far North Dallas council member Sandy Greyson: Politicians need to be wary about getting too deeply involved in the bid process.

How the bids stack up