Cumberland — We applaud the city of Cumberland’s proposal to give preference to local bidders on projects that are funded entirely by the city.
At last week’s mayor and council meeting, a resolution was introduced to extend a 7 percent bid preference for businesses located within Cumberland’s city limits and a 5 percent preference for businesses within Allegany County. “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.”
For years, the city has had city code language that gives such a preference to materials and equipment. But the preference has never covered actual building construction.
While there are not many projects that are funded solely with city money, when such work occurs, local firms will have an edge in attempting to get the work.
The importance of local preference was underscored last month when the Allegany County Board of Education voted to accept an out-of-county firm’s bid to renovate Greenway Avenue Stadium. The board said state law does not provide a local preference and it had no choice but to award the bid to Callas Contractors of Hagerstown, even though local contractor Carl Belt was close in the bidding. Had the school board had a local bid preference available to it, Belt may have been able to win the contract.
Fiedler said that the city’s proposed 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. We’ve always had the ability to keep things local within a certain percentage with objects but not with projects. 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.”
The Allegany County delegation in Annapolis has submitted bills in the House and Senate to give a preference to local businesses for public school construction projects like the stadium work. Action on the bills is still pending.
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