Cory Galliher
Cumberland Times-News
Oakland — CUMBERLAND — Cumberland is working to support local business by extending a 7 percent bid preference for businesses located within the city and a 5 percent bid preference for businesses located within Allegany County to be applied to projects funded entirely by the city.
At Tuesday evening’s public meeting of the mayor and City Council, a resolution was introduced to amend Chapter 154 of the city charter to include the bid preference. Language for such a bid preference already exists in the charter, though it applies only to materials and equipment purchased by the city and not to building projects. The bid preference will only be applied to projects wholly funded by city money.
“What this allows us to do is when we take bids on a certain project and a local business from the city is within several percent of the lowest bid, we could award them the bid because they’re local preference,” said Mayor Lee Fiedler. “Before, we could have a group in the city working on a building project for us, but they wouldn’t be the low bidder and we wouldn’t be able to award them the project unless we could prove they were better.”
Fiedler said that the amendment is important because it helps support the local economy. “You can look at a bottom line number and say that someone from New York is 1 percent lower than the guy from Cumberland, but the guy from Cumberland will keep our people working and paying taxes and doing things that are better for our economy,” said Fiedler. “Before, we didn’t have the ability to do this. That’s why we put it in.
“We’ve always had the ability to keep things local within a certain percentage with objects but not with projects,” added Fiedler. “We had a long discussion between the mayor and council and said we’d like to also have the ability to do it with projects.”
“This would only apply to projects that are 100 percent funded by the city,” said Councilman Brian Grim. “There aren’t a lot of those that happen, but the rationale behind this is is if you employ local contractors they put local people to work and the tax dollars stay local with local people.
“If you’ve got local hands involved in a project, they’re going to be using it later and there’s a sense of pride involved,” added Grim. “Local people use the project and local people are employed to build it. It makes good business sense.”
Grim said that he does not expect any objections to the resolution being approved at the next public meeting March 16. “It’s a case of — in a bad economy like this — you want to hire local people, get them involved in building projects like this and keep money as local as possible,” said Grim. “I don’t expect any objections to it.”
Cory Galliher can be reached at cgalliher@times-news.com.
