John Cabrales Jr. is the city administrator of New Fairview, Texas, on the border of Fort Worth. In an extreme contrast with a giant metropolis like Fort Worth, New Fairview covers 16 square miles, with a population of 2,200. Yet cities of all sizes have many similar key functions. “We’re a small operation,” says Cabrales. “But we provide all kinds of service that are required of most cities: roads, drainage, traffic signs, code enforcement and a park.”

Providing such services comes with an ongoing need for materials and equipment. That means sourcing the products, lining up vendors, following Texas procurement law, and ensuring a competitive price. With seven employees, “a city of our size doesn’t necessarily have the resources to do this,” he says.

That’s why Cabrales was grateful to be included in a group of about 20 city managers, and other high-level officials, who were invited to attend a meeting at the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) in late winter to talk about new opportunities to work together to procure services and goods they need with better prices coming from higher volume. The conversation included both the benefits and some of the potential pitfalls of a collaborative approach, including city hesitancy in sharing cybersecurity data and difficulties in collecting information without overburdening busy – and often small -- staffs. 

Getting city administrative leaders together to talk about common needs wasn’t a new idea for the NCTCOG, organized to strengthen both the individual and collective power of local governments and to help them recognize regional opportunities and make joint decisions. As part of this mission, its cooperative contracting program, TXShare, helps municipalities of all sizes find cooperative contracts that meet their needs.

Unlike many similar meetings, this one focused on city managers and CIOs and on ways that procurement, and the ever-growing world of cooperative contracting, could be improved by skilled use of artificial intelligence. The notion was to accomplish this through NCTCOG’s partnership with Civic Marketplace, co-founded by Ron Holifield, a well-known and highly respected former city manager and owner of Strategic Government Resources, and AI expert Al Hleileh, Civic Marketplace’s chief executive officer.

Civic Marketplace, which was launched in 2024, is not a cooperative itself, but was started to advance procurement practices, and ease the path for cities, counties and other government entities that utilize cooperative contracting, a sometimes-confusing world that can provide enormous benefits, but can also be frustrating due to the proliferation of options and the difficulty in accurately locating the best deals. “We want to help, educate and inform, but we don’t advocate for any specific contract or supplier,” says Hleileh.

“What we're looking to leverage with Civic Marketplace is volume purchasing,” says Jon Blackman, Chief Operations Manager for NCTCOG. “It’s no longer one city getting the best price for itself. When we bring 100 cities together to buy 100,000 uniforms that gives us a bigger piece of the pie and should ideally get us better pricing.”

One of the keys to this approach is for cities to avoid the tendency to carefully spell out the specifics of the items they procure, but instead to consider the outcomes the purchases provide, which helps to cast a wider net and to help bring down prices that can’t be achieved with an overly prescriptive approach.

To achieve that common purpose, Civic Marketplace integrates artificial intelligence into every aspect of the procurement process. While some of its approach is still experimental, it offers users access to a secure database of AI players, solutions, and vendors across the fields that cover just about every government need whether connected to public record management, compliance, environmental management, efficiency solutions, or library management. “We use AI across every aspect of the journey. We really want to push the frontier,” says Hleileh.

Artificial Intelligence helps cities zero in on solutions for what they need across a secure database that provides access to documents and helps sort out differences in city terminology that can bring multiple entities together as they search for a common need. 

For Cabrales, the meeting resulted in New Fairview joining TXShare, which has about 270 members both within Texas and increasingly in other states, as well. The messages he heard during the meeting were highly encouraging to him based on a desire to learn more about artificial intelligence tools that a public is growing to expect, and the needs of a very small city that has extremely limited internal procurement expertise to draw on.

One particularly big upcoming purchase is on Cabrales’s mind currently. After the new fiscal year begins on October 1, he expects that New Fairview’s approved budget will likely include the purchase of a ride-in Zero Turn lawnmower, based on the wear and tear of the current version, which was bought for about $16,000 four years ago and is used extensively both in the park and around city property. As an item in a $2.2 million budget, that’s a significant cost and “if I go out and get bids on my own, I’m not going to get a good price because I don’t have volume,” says Cabrares. 

That’s exactly where he’s expecting to get help from the NCTCOG-Civic Marketplace partnership and the potential that multiple cities can sign onto the same master agreement that will interest vendors in hundreds of lawn-mower purchases since it’s a common piece of equipment that cities use all over the nation.

The in-person meeting itself was a critical factor in moving forward. It meant not only talking about needs, but about what’s worked or hasn’t worked in procurement agreements in the past and how to improve. As with any AI discussion, the human element is critical. “If you understand the current drawbacks and issues that other users are experiencing, that allows us to better stage the RFP and the resulting master services agreement,” adds Blackman.

Listening to city staffers has been a central part of the Civic Marketplace approach. In forming the new business, Holifield says “we visited with over 250 procurement directors and had them tell us ‘This is what we need to do. This is how the system would work better.’ So we actually designed the technology around what the procurement directors were telling us.”

This article is sponsored by Civic Marketplace

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