When I stand dumbly in front of the wall of ketchup options at the local supermarket, the principles that guide my decision are fairly straightforward. I buy the item that offers the greatest utility per dollar\u2014that is to say, the option with the most value. However, when it\u2019s your money and my money (and the money of everybody we know) being spent, the decision becomes more complicated. How can we make sure we are all getting the best value for the taxes we pay?<\/p>\n
The answer (at least in the area of public works) is addressed via Competitive Bidding Requirements. These statutes dictate any project even partially funded by tax dollars be awarded to the \u201clowest responsible bidder\u201d. These requirements were created to cut down on costs, corruption, and get the most out of every tax dollar spent. But that\u2019s not the whole story of how these requirements affect taxpayers.<\/p>\n
Tim Watkins, Education & Policy Coordinator at Fair Contracting Foundation of MN, spoke to me about the drawbacks of Competitive Bidding Requirements and the downward spiral they create. All too often, this style of bidding results in the contending firms lowering their labor standards\u2014which consequently affects the final product & efficiency of construction.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you have that race to the bottom, you\u2019re not ultimately going to get the best value for publicly funded construction. Good value is important because when you\u2019re building a 50 year bridge, you don\u2019t want to have to fix it in 20 years,\u201d Tim explained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I stand dumbly in front of the wall of ketchup options at the local supermarket, the principles that guide my decision are fairly straightforward. I buy the item that offers the greatest utility per dollar\u2014that is to say, the option with the most value. However, when it\u2019s your money and my money (and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1169,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.semnbctrades.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}