Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Procurement topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Procurement director details 10-year lookback on contracts under $175,000; TMP purchases grew to $53.5M in 2024
Summary
Procurement presented a decade-long review of informal contracts under $175,000, explaining Target Market Program procedures and reporting $53.5 million in TMP purchases for 2024; councilmembers requested additional exhibits and follow-up on amendment dollar amounts and missing historical data fields.
Pam Fernandez, Director of Procurement, presented a 10-year report on completed solicitations and contracts under $175,000 and described how the Target Market Program (TMP) is used to direct informal opportunities to registered small businesses.
Fernandez said Minnesota statute (471.345) sets the statutory informal threshold and explained that departments run informal bids or informal RFPs for work between $5,000 and $175,000. She told the committee: "Last year, 2024, we did $53.5 million worth of businesses with this Target Market Program" and noted that TMP participation rose from $40 million in 2023.
The presentation included data on procurement methods, unique vendors (about 1,706 professional-services vendors and 221 construction vendors in the reviewed period), and contract amendment patterns. Fernandez said the majority of informal construction bids involved TMP vendors (206 of 249) and acknowledged limitations in records prior to 2019 when the city moved to an electronic procurement workflow.
Councilmembers asked for follow-up detail including a dollar tally of contract amendments, why some contracts list amounts above $175,000 in the exhibits, and a breakdown of the procurement methods for vendors awarded many contracts. Fernandez said some small pilot contracts subsequently grew beyond the threshold and that missing event-type fields are a legacy data-gap for pre-2019 records; she agreed to provide additional exhibits and requested guidance on where the committee saw gaps in transparency.
The clerk received and filed the report and the committee adjourned.
