TO: Pete Sprague, Assembly President

Members of the Borough Assembly

FROM: Linda Murphy, Borough Clerk

DATE: January 9, 2004

SUBJECT: Ordinance 2004-02, Authorizing the Purchase of Election Materials Without Obtaining Competitive Bids

With each borough election, whether regular or special, the Clerk's Office faces very short deadlines to provide for layout and printing of the voter pamphlet, the printing of ballots, and, at times, the printing of certain specialty items such as absentee and questioned voting envelopes.

In recognition of this tight time frame, as well as the technical skills needed to produce optical scan ballots, the Code already provides authorization for the Clerk to contract for the printing of ballots without obtaining competitive bids. I would submit that this same reasoning applies to the provision of other election materials, supplies and services.

Although we know that we will need a voter pamphlet each year, we do not know either the number of total pages, number of ballots to be represented, number of color pages to be inserted, or number of candidate photos and biographies we will be including in the pamphlet until approximately 3 to 4 weeks before those pamphlets must be delivered to the post office. In addition, it makes perfect sense to use the same printer for both ballot and voter pamphlet production since the ballot printer already has our official ballots in an electronic form, saving our office the necessity of reproducing these pages prior to publication. Printworks, a Homer-based printer, has been producing both our ballots and our voter pamphlet for the past three years, and we have been very pleased with both the service and the quality of the product we receive. Because the pamphlet has grown in size due to the inclusion of candidate photos and biographies, precinct maps and other important information necessary for peninsula voters to make informed choices at the polls, the cost has also risen, placing the printing of the voter pamphlet in the price range requiring competitive bids.

Similarly, the production of specialty envelopes for absentee voting, including by-mail precincts during regular elections, regular absentee by mail voting, absentee in person voting, special needs voting, and by-mail elections, as well as envelopes for questioned voting, are special order items.

We have a local printer who can provide these envelopes on fairly short notice since he has their layout on file. In addition, we save a considerable amount of money if we buy these envelopes in quantities of 5,000 or more. When you consider the fact that each absentee ballot mailed by our office requires three special order envelopes, you can see that a 5,000-envelope order is actually an order for 15,000 envelopes. Further, we have designed the return envelope (the one the voter uses to return his ballot to the borough) so that all personal information about the voter is completely covered with a large flap, sealed on two ends, and perforated so that we can uncover that personal information and identifiers for review by the Canvass Board without opening the envelope itself and violating the voter's right to secrecy of his ballots. Even with bulk ordering, these envelopes are expensive to produce. Therefore, in order to realize the savings available when ordering in bulk, we generally exceed the dollar limit for sole source purchases.

Although the purchasing code does provide that the Mayor may authorize certain purchases without formal bidding when the requesting department can justify a sole source contract, the code amendment set forth in Ordinance 2004-02 will eliminate the necessity for seeking special authorization from the Mayor and will eliminate any questions on the part of the Finance Department as to the propriety of such sole source purchases.