Council approves communications purchase, waives bid

The Maricopa City Council approved a measure Tuesday to allow the purchase of up to $12,000 in radio equipment designed to upgrade the city’s emergency communications system, making it accessible simultaneously to the city’s police and fire agencies, and to do so without sending the purchase out to bid.

“We aren’t spending $10,000 or $12,000 for a $500 part are we?” Councilman Will Dunn asked before agreeing to any purchasing short cuts. “It’s priced right?”

While waiving the bid process might seem unusual, Paul Jepson, a management assistant with the city, said that in this case doing so made perfect sense.

The purchase is for a combiner, which would need to be custom built to work properly with emergency radio equipment already in place.

“It’s like a traffic cop.” Jepson said, adding that because radio signals run up the antennae one at a time, the combiner is needed to allow multiple agencies to use the same system and the same frequency without worries of any emergency transmissions being lost in the process.

“It would not be in the best interest of public safety to use anyone else to build this important part of our network,” Jepson said of his recommendation to award the business to Creative Communications Sales & Rentals Inc.

Tom Mecker, the senior account executive with Creative Communications who services the city’s account, agreed.

“It’s not the kind of thing you can readily go to bid for,” he explained in a telephone interview late Tuesday morning. “It’s all a question of being efficient time-wise and cost-wise.”

Mecker said he has been working with the city since prior to its incorporation and the local fire district for the past few years, before it came under the city’s jurisdiction.

“They trust our judgment. We do a great job for them,” he said. “They don’t want to bring in problems with equipment that doesn’t work with what they have.”

Maricopa is not alone in selecting Creative Communications as its radio equipment provider of choice. Lake Havasu recently spent between $5 and $6 million with them for system changes. Bullhead City spent $500,000 for a new console and La Paz County dropped $1.5 million to update and replace its emergency radio system. In Glendale, a recent price tag for products and services for their communications system totaled about $8 million.

Because of its specialized products and services and because they are “sold to every city in the state, including the city of Phoenix,” Mecker said, Creative Communications has pre-negotiated prices on its Motorola equipment for purchases made under state or city contracts, “to guarantee communities the best pricing.”

The price list was created to relieve the time and resources it normally takes to go to bid,” Mecker said. “They know they have a negotiated price, and it’s a very good price.”

Jepson alerted Council members that he will return in December to request the purchase of an additional repeater, bringing up the city’s total inventory of them to three.

“There is one more piece to this puzzle,” Jepson said.

Photo by Mandy Hank