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Bend subcommittee reviews procurement activity and spending patterns
Summary
City staff told the Procurement Subcommittee that over a recent biennium the city processed tens of thousands of small purchases and that most high-dollar contracting work is concentrated in a small number of formal solicitations.
The City of Bend Procurement Subcommittee heard staff describe how the city’s purchasing is concentrated in many low-dollar transactions while a comparatively small number of formal contracts account for the largest dollar values.
Subcommittee members met to discuss procurement thresholds, how departments use delegated purchase authority, and the consequences for vendor outreach and supplier-diversity efforts. Justin Sweet, a procurement staff member, led the presentation and provided the spending and transaction breakdowns.
Sweet said the city “spent over $50,000,000 on purchases that individually were valued at less than $25,000.” He told the subcommittee those small direct-award transactions are handled at the department level without a formal competitive requirement under state or city code. Sweet also said that, combined with purchase orders and procurement-card transactions, “over 21 and a half thousand transactions were done in that below $25,000 threshold,” which he described as an area with opportunity for centralized outreach to diversify the supplier pool.
By contrast, Sweet reported that roughly $171,000,000 of spend during the same biennium was in contracts that exceed the city’s formal threshold and therefore require formal solicitation and council approval. He also said the intermediate category (informal competition) amounted to just over $33,500,000 across 477 transactions, and that the city recorded 124 formal-threshold transactions in the period he showed.
Staff emphasized that the city’s procurement work is a mix of decentralized direct awards, hybrid “three-quote” informal procurements and fully formal solicitations. Ryan Oster, a public-works staff member who participated in the discussion, and other staff explained that departments may conduct direct awards below the delegated threshold but are asked to coordinate with central procurement when work is likely to generate a contract that legal must draft.
The subcommittee heard additional context: staff said the city paid vendors across more than 1,700 distinct vendors in that period, and that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system contains more than 3,100 active vendor records (some inactive in practice). Members discussed how unbundling small purchases, outreach at lower dollar thresholds, and central advising could expand competition and improve supplier-diversity outreach.
The meeting included a brief procedural action: the subcommittee approved the March 11 meeting minutes by voice vote during roll call.
Staff said they will return with follow-up material showing where supplier-diversity levers can be applied across the different procurement tiers and with proposals to improve vendor outreach for the many below-$25,000 transactions.
