Public Frustrated by Repeated Delays to Flawed Tennis Tender Process
March 12th, 2010I have serious concerns about the tender process that appears to have been designed to place the City’s tennis courts under the management of a single operator. Should the recommendation of council staff be adopted the operator at Ruchcutters Bay tennis courts will be tossed out after 25 years of service to the community. The Greens councillors consider such a proposal to be unreasonable & unfair. At an extraordinary meeting on Monday 1st March (attended by around 200 people protesting the recommendation, shown below) the Clover
Moore Party used their numbers to defer the tender process for a second time. Councillor Doutney and myself, along with the Labor and Liberal Councillors, voted against the motion.
As Greens we have three key concerns with the tender process: shortcomings with information provided to councillors, inconsistent treatment of individual tenderers during the process and a failure of the tender criteria & process to capture the “community benefit” that councillors had requested.
The level of benefit that an applicant could provide to the community was meant to be the most heavily weighted criteria upon which a successful tender was assessed. However the hundreds of emails that Councillors received from the Rushcutters Bay community have provided information about the local operator that should have been presented to Councillors in the staff report on the tenders at the Finance Committee on 15th February 2010.
There has been no performance review of the current tennis court operators at Rushcutters Bay, despite this being required by local government tendering guidelines. As a result the free coaching, court hire & equipment hire to children from Darlinghurst & Plunkett St Public Schools over the past fifteen years was not reported to councillors and could not have been considered in the tender assessment.
Another piece of highly relevant information was a proposed Franks Family scholarship of $100,000 per annum to provide coaching & court time for 40 children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Again this was not reported to councillors and therefore could not have been considered in the tender assessment.
The Greens are also very concerned about the inconsistent treatment of the two tenderers who made direct contact with councillors in order to lobby for their bid. One tenderer was excluded and the other, who ended up as the recommended tenderer, was not. I have read the “no lobbying” clause in the tender and the emails from tenderers (see attachment 1 below). I can’t see why one was ousted and the other was not. The decision seems biased and unfair.
I have since sought legal advice from a senior counsel Francis Douglas QC who advised that the email from the tenderer who was not excluded had indeed breeched the tender guidelines (see attachment 2 below). Further the awarding of the tender to the offending tenderer could see such a decision invalidated by a court and damages sought from the City of Sydney.
Once the legal advice was tabled the Clover Moore Party scrambled to defer the process until a more thorough investigation could be carried out, but this is not a positive way forward. To simply delay a process with so many flaws in it so that just one of those flaws can be investigated, while ignoring all the others, is not in the interest of the community.
People have invested significant time and effort in writing to Council and turning up to meetings in order to try to make sure the process reflects their very reasonable desires for their community. They deserve better than to have to wait once more for a flawed process to turn out an unsatisfactory outcome. The process needs to be restarted with criteria that will accurately reflect the benefits that each applicant will provide, and has provided previously, to the community.
