Do You Think Someone on City Staff is Incompetent?

 
My two cents :      Or: It is not their Money, what do they care !

 
from :  Newton White
Below is the information I provided to council members and other activists in the city. I have no beef with Diamond Quest or individuals in city staff. Please take the time to look back at my steps to look at the equipment from the manufactures website, read the attached agenda item carefully, do your own search for “Quote Wire”, check the address of Diamond Quest. Remember this is for $50,000 of $150,000 annual cost.
Is the process used by staff appropriate for declaring any vendor as sole source and not at least finding a second and third cost option to compare?  Is the process in place being followed every time or does the process need to be changed?
also attached is a pdf of the January 7, agenda item
__________________________________________________________________________
I am not sure what to think that staff could not find another bidder except they were not looking very hard. I thought I would look a little. Diamond Quest is a company from Orlando and apparently they are a dealer for Genetec http://www.genetec.com/
A Google map search of their address and a double check on the Orange County property appraisers site confirmed the location of the business.
Google, Bing, Yellow Pages.com  and Dogpile searches gave me nothing but stock quotes, wire and cable companies for Quote Wire where the bid was advertized in early December. I am not sure who would have found if, I cannot find quote wire? I checked on demand star as well and found nothing.
Again the further I dig the worse it gets. To think all that caught my interest was the last time this came across with less documentation for it being sole source it seemed odd that security cameras would be sole source.
Reading the bid carefully I do not know what they have done to modify Genetec’s product to make it proprietary but Genetec looks like a pretty well wrapped deal by it’s self.
Newton