Carrollton City Council addresses managed competition updates

Carrolton Leader
By Arianna Morrison | Star Local Media
October 28, 2022

The Carrollton City Council met on Tuesday, Oct. 25 to discuss an update on managed competition and discuss consent agenda items.

Krystle Boise, Director of Strategic Services at City of Carrollton, gave an update on managed competition during the executive session. Managed competition is the process in which the city benchmarks each city operation against comparison cities to ensure market competitiveness. This specific update focused on four divisions of public works: asphalt, concrete, contract administration, and drainage divisions.

“This review produced some significant changes to the public works operation,” Boise said. “Changes that are necessary and exciting and really showcase the department’s commitment to being more competitive.”

Since 2001, the city of Carrollton has had success in reducing costs, right-sizing its organization, adopting best practices, streamlining processes and leveraging technology. This has produced an outcome of a culture of continuous improvement and saved more than $45 million, according to the city.

The goal of a managed competition review is for the competing business to declare “substantially competitive.” Three out of the four divisions were found to be substantially competitive. Only concrete was found to be not substantially competitive.

Asphalt’s emergency work gives them a competitive advantage and they were found to be substantially competitive, however, the lack of communication and capacity for the concrete division to follow up on asphalt’s temporary repairs lead to multiple temporary repairs on the same issues.

Concrete’s widened scope of work and lack of competitive metrics resulted, initially, in the division being found not to be substantially competitive, the city reported. As the division is unable to compete with the private sector on price alone, it was recommended that they refocus their scope of work. Once this shift focus has occurred, the division can be found to be substantially competitive.

As the nature of contract administration is foundationally affected by the competitive bidding process, the division is inherently substantially competitive. Due to shifting markets and an assortment of other facts this division was found to be underutilized and should grow as a fact of public works.

Because of drainage’s wide scope of work and emergency duties, the division was found to be substantially competitive, but it was found that the small division was spread too thin in their duties.

The Strategic Services Department is recommending that contract administration will grow into a larger division under a new manager position and will incorporate drainage maintenance and large street repair projects. The department was recommended that the drainage division evolve into a special operations division, the asphalt and concrete crews be merged into a single streets division, and a compliance officer position be added.

With these recommendations, it will not cost the city of Carrollton anything and will actually end up saving the city around $170,000, Boise said.

During the regular session, all items on the consent agenda were passed unanimously, except for item 28, which was pulled for discussion.

The item was pulled to reconsider the appointment of one of the members to serve on the Museum and Historical Advisory Committee who had allegedly said vicious statements to the council and community members in the past, according to Councilmembers Adam Polter and Richard Fleming.

Councilmember Young Sung motioned to approve the appointment of the member for the Museum and Historical Advisory Committee and it passed 5-2.

Arianna Morrison is a reporter for Star Local Media, covering the communities of The Colony, Little Elm, Carrollton, Lewisville, Flower Mound and Coppell. Email her with story ideas and more at amorrison@starlocalmedia.com.