FOIA Friday: Getting the municipal compost story right
On Wednesday, I wrote an article about the City of Ann Arbor's efforts to outsource its compost operations. It was a brief description of what I had found out about competing bids for the operations, and described a set of cost and revenue implications which were unusual enough that I noted that it deserved further study.
On Wednesday, I also discovered that one of the key assumptions I had made when writing the story — that the numbers I was looking at reflected the current bid document — were wrong. What I thought was a set of figures regarding the latest 2010 request for proposals were really figures from last year's 2009 RFP, which was similar but not precisely the same.
We decided to remove that article, leaving readers with a "forbidden" message when they try to go to the url for it. I've been looking to better understand the pieces that I got wrong, and today's FOIA Friday looks at some of the places I've been going to fill in the story that I still don't quite understand. When the details are correct, the article will be republished.
Procurement: getting copies of bid documents
Bid documents, once they have been opened, are public records. If a project has been put up for competitive bids, you can request copies of those bid documents to inspect.
Requests for bid documents are completely routine in the commercial contracting world, especially for vendors who have prepared a bid for a project and then lost the bid to a competitor. You can get a tremendous amount of competitive intelligence about the cost structure of an organization by looking at its proposals, and you can also use it as an opportunity to understand the structure, and graphic design of winning proposals.
It is possible to use the formal FOIA process to request bid information, but it is not always necessary. A request for portions of the responses to the City of Ann Arbor's compost proposals was handled quickly and efficiently through a simple e-mail to the city procurement department. Some, but not all of the recent bid responses are online on the city's Open Bids and Proposals page, and you can identify a specific contract about which to request further information on the Awarded Bids and Proposals page.
What I found through this process is what caused us to pull the article as written. A portion of the current RFP for compost materials referenced bid figures from the previous year's RFP for the same request, and I misinterpreted those 2009 figures as being from 2010. My request for a detailed breakdown of bid assumptions revealed that error.
Expenses: tracking and understanding city accounting for costs
The City of Ann Arbor Data Catalog publishes a number of reports and documents about municipal finance, including an (PDF).
This data set contains a summary of expenditures vs. budget for the City of Ann Arbor for the current fiscal year. The report is organized by Fund, Agency, Organization, Activity and Function and lists the transactions posted to each account for all expenditure accounts of the city. This report is updated monthly. The Accounting Services Unit is part of the Financial and Administrative Services Area. For information about specific transactions, please contact the person listed below.
This report, which in the current month runs to 637 pages, details the expenditures for every single piece of the system. It does a remarkable job illustrating the complexity of the city budget, and how expenses are tracked and allocated across a plethora of accounts, sub-accounts, project codes and categories.
My look at compost took me to Fund 0072 (Solid Waste), Agency 061 (Field Operations), Organization 2500 (Compost), and Activity 7060 (Operations). Within that budget, Account 2421 (Fleet Maintenance and Repair) shows a $303,336.00 budget line item for the compost operation. The question, quite reasonably, is what does this money represent? It's a substantial portion of the savings associated with the plans to outsource the city's compost operations to WeCare Organics.
I spoke with Marti Praschan in the city's Finance Department, who explained that this figure represented an internal transfer of funds from the Compost budget to the Fleet & Facility Services account, to account for the maintenance and repair of the equipment on site at the compost facility. It does not reflect any of the costs for the trucks that pick up the municipal compost, just the maintenance of heavy machinery on site that mixes, mashes, screens, grinds and turns the compost.
Maintenance of heavy equipment is expensive. In many systems, the maintenance cost is relatively independent of the amount of use the equipment gets; if you have to tear down a system annually, it may not matter much whether you ran 9,000 tons through it or 30,000 tons through it. One way of understanding the cost savings associated with outsourcing is that all proposals reflect an increase in the volume through the system, and thus the maintenance costs would be spread across a larger volume of production.
The benefits of open data
I'm a bit closer to understanding the cost and accounting structure of the system, though at every stage of the way one revelation of how the city balances its books is accompanied by puzzlement at some other portion of it.
Because the city's budget information is online, I don't have to start with a FOIA request just to get basic numbers. This is tremendously helpful, because it's unclear that I would be able to prepare a request that would elicit the response I would want, in part because before digging into this 637 page document I would have no idea which account and sub-account contain the details.
I'm closer to rewriting the original story after talking to more people about it. There is a risk to writing from source documents and not checking your conclusions with people in the know, which I wrote about earlier (On Writing From Public Records, April 2010). You want people who know what's going on to catch and alert you to any obvious mistakes. The more dangerous question, regarding matters of great municipal concern but little municipal understanding, is that you tell a completely plausible story that was utterly wrong in its interpretation of obscure details.
Edward Vielmetti tries to tell straightforward stories about complicated systems for AnnArbor.com.
Comments
Jack Eaton
Fri, Nov 19, 2010 : 12:44 p.m.
Ed, thanks for following up on this story. I think it is odd for the City to treat the compost service as a profit center. I was under the impression that we passed the solid waste millage to fund services including the composting facility. Perhaps as part of your follow up, you could find the original solid waste millage language. I'm pretty sure that pre-dates online records. on a similar theme, it would be interesting to take a look at the discussions surrounding the funding of the composting facility improvements. The City just recently spent a lot of money upgrading the facility that will now be turned over to a private company.