The city of Atlanta’s Byzantine process for contracting is often a source of frustration — not just for would-be vendors, but even for elected officials.
Some of those frustrations spilled out this week before a City Council committee in debate over companies selected by Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to open new shops on multiple concourses.
The airport is in the middle of a vast and long-delayed overhaul of its retail and food offerings, a process that’s been upended by a pandemic as well as earlier contracting hiccups and challenges to the city’s procurement process.
The Atlanta airport chose Paradies Lagardère to open seven food and beverage locations and three shops on Concourses A, B and C.
Joint ventures led by airport retailer Hudson Group were selected to open about 20 retail locations on Concourses T, A, B and C with two contracts, according to Atlanta City Council documents and the Georgia Corporations Division’s directory.
The three packages of retail or food concession locations each drew four to seven proposals from companies hoping to win the 10-year contracts.
On Monday, at a meeting of the transportation committee that oversees the airport, council members questioned city procurement officials about the process used to choose the winner of one of the retail contracts.
There were also complaints that bid documents from some subcontractors to the headline companies were not properly filled out yet were approved by the city.
“We’ve had a lot of different issues coming out of the bidding process and just want to make sure we’re doing this right,” said Council member Antonio Lewis. He added that he has questions around “transparency, process, equity, fairness, reporting, communication, competition, disqualifications.”
“It doesn’t feel like process. It feels like politics,” Lewis said later in the meeting.
Reviews of the concessions contracting by the Independent Procurement Review Division of the city’s Office of Inspector General found that of seven bidders for the Paradies contract, only three were deemed “responsive,” meaning they met all the requirements in the request for proposals. The city contracting process can be complex, time-consuming and costly for companies to go through.
There were only two responsive bidders for each of the retail contracts, out of four bidders for one and five bidders for the other. The two responsive bidders for both were Paradies Lagardère and the Hudson Group companies.
According to the Independent Procurement Review report, there were business certificates missing from a contract file for three joint venture partners of a winning retail firms.
In another instance, a minority partner did not provide a letter of intent as required, and two joint venture partners did not provide forms as required by an Office of Contract Compliance form, according to the review of the retail contracting.
“The Department (of Procurement) is very particular as far as the items and things that are being missed,” Philippe Jefferson, a manager in the Department of Procurement, said during the meeting. “I think in this particular case, there was a small waiver due to that small minority partner.” He said the Department of Procurement shares certain documents with the Office of Contract Compliance for evaluation.
Council member Alex Wan said: “We’re starting to see a lot of just missed this and missed that, and it feels like we’re starting to be really flexible in terms of (companies) being able to go back and correct things or add things or submit things.”
“What about those vendors that later can claim I didn’t submit everything, I didn’t check everything, and y’all threw my bid out, but y’all kept these other ones before in other procurements,” Wan said.
Jaideep Majumdar, the city’s chief procurement officer, responded to some of the council members’ questions and pledged: “We are running an open, fair, transparent, competitive process, which means we are following all the rules that we have put in place for a supplier to be deemed responsive, to move forward and award a contract.”
He said in some cases, procurement employees are missing a document when they send a file over to the Independent Procurement Review Division. “We are putting some measures in place to make sure that we minimize” the findings in the Independent Procurement Review, Majumdar said.
But Byron Amos, chair of the transportation committee, said the process “is broken and is not working” for concessionaires.
Most members of the transportation committee abstained in their vote on the retail contract in question, while Council member Dustin Hillis voted in favor. The concessions measures move forward to the full City Council for a vote. Wan said he is seeking answers to questions about the contracting process before the full City Council votes Monday.
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