When it comes to competitive swimming, Burlington swimmers have 2 outdoor and 4 indoor pools to choose from.
The city’s recent and controversial decision to award an “RFP” to the Golden Horseshoe Aquatics Club (GHAC) over the Burlington Aquatic Devilrays (BAD) requires a closer look.
First, the term “RFP” stands for Request For Proposal. This is a standard term used by governments and corporations when purchasing goods or services. The keyword is purchasing. When the city wants to buy something, like a snow plow, the city issues an RFP. Snow plow suppliers submit proposals, and then the city selects a vendor. Goods and/or services are purchased from the vendor, and the city pays the vendor.
As reported in the Burlington Gazette, the mayor stated, “Council is forbidden by law from being involved in any procurement process”. The Mayor was wrong on at least one point. Allocating pool time is not procurement. As stated in the “RFP” – “The Pool User shall pay $110.00 per hour for the annual commitment of 2,000 hours”. In other words, BAD or GHAC, will pay $220,000 a year to the city for pool time.
Oddly, our council, the council that apparently is forbidden by law from being involved in any procurement process, awarded a contract to Burlington Green for services, without an RFP, in other words, without asking for competitive bids.
GHAC has been awarded the right to use the pools, provided they meet this requirement, stated in the RFP, by September – “a minimum of 85% of participants are Burlington residents”.
BAD is threatening a lawsuit. Our council is dealing with this issue in closed session, severely limiting the amount of information available to the public.
What are council’s options?
1 – Double Down – Emphatically state the process was followed correctly, BAD was eliminated on a technicality after serving Burlington swimmers for 40 years, too bad. This may well result in a lawsuit from BAD, but voters won’t hear the details of the lawsuit, the legal costs, or the settlement amount. With an election year coming up council’s priority may be to get this over with as quickly and quietly as possible, no matter how expensive the legal and settlement costs are. Voters will never know what those costs are.
2 – Flip Flop – Now that the GHAC has been told they have the right to rent Burlington pools, take that right away and give it to BAD. GHAC may well sue the city, resulting in expensive legal and settlement costs. Again, we’ll never know what the costs are. Council may go for this one, swimmers and parents will be happy, taxpayers will be kept in the dark, and this option may be the least damaging for our councillors who are seeking re-election.
3 – Find 4000 hours of pool time, 2000 for GHAC and 2000 for BAD, require that each group meet the requirement that 85% of participants are from Burlington. This works out to about 40 hours a week of pool time per club. This might be possible over 6 pools, but when you consider that Mountainside was rebuilt by this council, and is no longer usable as a lap pool, there are only 5 pools. Mountainside has three single lanes. The lanes are so narrow that only one person can use a lane at a time. Nelson has wide lanes allowing 20 or even 30 swimmers, swimming at similar speeds, to use a lane at the same time. Adding to the pool problems, there is a rumour that the Tansley Woods pool is not the correct length for competitions.
Is there a lawyer in the house? The Pool Commitment Agreement states, “The City issued a request for proposals RFP-25-202 seeking to contract with a single organization to rent a designated number of hours at City Pools, for the exclusive purpose of delivering Youth Development and Competitive Swimming Programs.” Maybe option 3 is not an option.
Is there another option? Instead of lawsuits and settlement payments, would the money be better spent on a dome over Nelson pool, combined with more publicly available lap swim times?
This has the potential to become an expensive mess. Taxpayers are drowning, and our lifeguards, our mayor and councillors, are not likely to throw us a lifeline.
Here are links to a copy of the city’s “RFP” and addendums.
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“It is your responsibility to make sure the uploaded file(s) is/are not defective or corrupted and are able to be opened and viewed by the City. If the attached file(s) cannot be opened or viewed, your Bid / Proposal may be rejected.
• Certificate of incorporation as a Non-Profit or Not-for-Profit organization (mandatory)”
The RFP is quite clear. The certificate of incorporation was a mandatory part of the bid.
This is different from what is described in the publicly available summary.
Thanks for making this available. Looks like a lot of commentators in the Gazette never actually looked at the actual bid document. BAD wouldn’t stand a chance in court.
There is no “Certificate of incorporation as a Non-profit or Not-for-Profit”. This is a misnomer. There are Certificates of Status/Compliance/Good Standing.
There certainly are Certificates of Incorporation
They are issued under different legislation for Non-Profit, Not-For-Profit and For-Profit organizations.
GHAC obviously produce a Certificate of Incorporation under the legislation governing Non-Profit organisations. They met the requirements of the RFP.
BAD submitted a Certificate of Status (as is currently the legal document to submit). Within their documents they also (to my knowledge) attached the Certificate of incorporation which is a historical document that they received in 1992. The issue in the RFP was with the wording of a « current and valid » certificate of incorporation. Because this is a historical document and doesn’t get updated or renewed it was not possible to submit a « current » certificate of incorporation. To show their current status, BAD instead submitted the Certificate of Status (and as an addendum their certificate of incorporation), however due to the way that the documents are submitted, BAD was disqualified outright without their proposal being opened or even considered (or looking at the attached documentation).
It furthermore seems that a Certificate of status was acceptable in the previous RFP in which Burlington Masters and GHAC both submitted applications. Thus this begs the question why the certificate of status is not acceptable for BAD’s submission.