At Item J3 the commission opened a review of professional-services procurement after a resident's letter argued the municipal code exempts many professional services from competitive bidding. Commissioners read the municipal code language aloud and discussed that "professional services of engineers, architects, accountants, attorneys, doctors, and other professional classes are hereby declared to be noncompetitive and bids need not be received," language cited from the city code in the meeting packet.

Commissioners asked staff to assemble a concise metric for city council showing the annual amount spent on professional services that did not go through a competitive procurement process. Staff said the city can export purchase-order data from its financial system and will identify which contracts are professional services, which were competitively bid and will annualize multi-year contracts to produce an annual spending figure. Staff also said it is preparing benchmarking data comparing thresholds and practices with neighboring cities and suggested reasonable next steps: identify high-dollar or frequently recurring services that make sense to subject to competition and establish pragmatic thresholds or a simple three-tier quoting/bidding rule.

The commission voted to bring the item back at a future meeting after staff refines the dataset, marks which purchase orders are professional services and prepares an annualized figure that the commission can use in recommending any code changes to city council.