GovSpend announced the winner of its first procurement award on February 2, 2018. This honor was awarded to Joe Ruggiero, Director of Capital Improvements at the Housing Authority of Monroe County, PA, for saving $50,000 dollars.
This was fantastic and we just had to know more about it. So we gave Joe a call and asked! When Joe initially signed up for the GovSpend application, it was because he needed a tool that allowed him to find reliable vendors that he could use.
This particular use of the application was how he saved $50,000 on tree trimming for his housing project. After shopping around, he had a few quotes to choose from… but, after a quick search in the GovSpend application, he found that one of his peer agencies in Lackawanna County was using a vendor who wasn’t part of the preferred co-op in Pennsylvania (COSTARS).
He hadn’t heard of this particular vendor before, but the fact that this agency had an ongoing contract with the vendor told him that they were reliable. They had already established relationships with an agency, and had clearly done the work well since they’d been called back multiple times. Joe didn’t hesitate; he was able to piggyback on the existing contract, locking in the same rate for his own agency.
We have heard about other agencies piggybacking with vendors in the public sector. The U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recommends that agencies piggyback off each other whenever possible, to save money on projects and to lock in specific rates. This means that one agency has negotiated a contract for a specific price and a neighboring agency that needs that service can come in and join the contract to secure that rate.
This is similar to how co-operative contracts work, however, co-ops are initiated through a non-profit organization versus directly from the agency. Organizations like U. S. Communities work to aggregate groups of vendors together into contracts and make them available to agencies that need them.
The problem that can often occur when trying to piggyback between agencies is that there are 90,000 agencies and they can’t all communicate with each other. So how do agencies find new opportunities and new vendors? Joe uses the GovSpend application to do just that. It’s less time consuming than most agency processes and still compliant with HUD.
Joe saved $50,000 for the housing projects tree trimming. This money could then be reallocated to other portions of the Housing project, such as renovating all of the kitchens. This level of savings won him the GovSpend Procurement award.
Check out the app and find new vendors today!
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