Council must resist playing favourites

Published: August 18, 2009 6:00 PM Penticton Western News Editorial:

The question of whether council should pay more for services and contracts if it benefits local business stood front and centre Monday when it awarded a $19.74 million contract to a Kelowna company ahead of Greyback Construction, whose bid came in almost $500,000 higher. The discussion revealed that Penticton council received a lot of pressure from the local business community (but not Greyback itself apparently) to tender the contract locally. While council resisted this pressure in awarding the contract to the lowest bid, we get the sense that it did so with clenched teeth. Saying no to a local company whose roots run deep throughout the community is not an easy thing. Yet we wonder how they would feel if the City of Kelowna were to tell a Penticton company that they could not bid on contract because it is not local. The issue certainly confirms the old adage that all politics is local and we suspect that few would have complained if the city had gone with Greyback, especially during this current economic climate. But the stakes involved in this decision were much higher than they might appear.

Several members of this council — starting with Mayor Dan Ashton — have long records of insisting on fiscal prudence. Council also began their current term with the reputation of being business savvy. It also had to consider the legal ramifications of the decision. So this question involved nothing less than council’s credibility as the custodian of the city’s finances. Any deviation from this responsibility would have raised serious questions about council’s fiduciary duty. Its reputation (whether rightly or wrongly) has already suffered in recent months with every financial update from the South Okanagan Events Centre. While it cannot control some of the factors, which have caused the facility to under-perform, it can control the awarding of city contracts. In that sense, it must be ruthless in awarding the contract to the lowest tender (assuming it meets all the qualifications) regardless of its home base. This is not just good business, but good politics in the long run, even if it ruffles some feathers.