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Council reviews updates to purchasing policy, seeks alignment with city ordinance and ethics rules
Summary
City staff presented proposed updates to the procurement/purchasing policy (not updated ~27 years) including raising approval thresholds, aligning materiality thresholds with the ethics ordinance, changing requisition timing, and setting a 10% aggregate change-order threshold; several numeric figures in the transcript are unclear and are noted as such.
City finance/procurement staff told the council the city's purchasing policy has not been updated for approximately 27 years and presented a draft to align policy with current practice and the city's ethics ordinance.
Staff described major proposed changes: raising approval thresholds for purchase orders; establishing layered approval for purchases (department-level approval for smaller purchases, department head plus finance manager for mid-tier purchases, and full council approval for larger procurements); aligning the policy's materiality/gift-reporting threshold with the ordinance; changing requisition timing to a relative date (for example, 30 days before the end of the fiscal year) rather than fixed dates; and allowing change orders up to 10% of a contract aggregate with notice to the city manager and finance director, with anything exceeding 10% returned to council.
Transcript discussion included numeric threshold figures but some were garbled in the record. For example, staff said the policy would "increase the thresholds from $500,000 for purchasing orders to now $2,000" and later referenced approval tiers "under $5,000" and "under $10,000"; because the transcript is inconsistent, the article notes that specific numeric thresholds are not fully specified in the meeting record and that final ordinance language will determine exact dollar levels.
Council members and staff agreed the intent is to remove conflicts between the ordinance and internal policy so both documents align. Staff said the policy changes will be formalized in an ordinance so that the policy and ordinance "will both plug each other."
