Small local governments often have difficulties shouldering their procurement challenges alone. What’s more, a lack of resources can make it difficult to comply with the federal and state laws that require they adhere to a complex set of rules for governing procurement.

On Wednesday, September 24, a webinar, co-hosted by Civic Marketplace and Barrett and Greene Inc., will be held at 2 p.m. ET that will delve into the issues faced by smaller cities and towns that lack their own procurement expertise and yet have purchasing and contracting needs that can parallel those encountered by far larger governments. Registration for the webinar is here.

In addition to a discussion of the procurement issues faced by small entities, the webinar will delve into how Fairview, a 11,000-population town in Texas, dealt with its need for a more advanced system for reading residential water meters, utilizing technology advances that have been of interest to many cities throughout the U.S.

Webinar speakers will include:

• Fairview Town Manager Julie Couch

• Troy Riggs, executive director of The Alliance for Innovation, and

• Diane Palmer-Boeck, former longtime procurement director in Plano, TX, and a consultant to the North Central Texas Council of Governments TXShare cooperative contracting program.

In Texas, where extreme heat can increase water consumption dramatically, Fairview was particularly interested in developing a system that could yield far better information to explain high water bills to residents. 

The panel discussion will focus on how Fairview was able to find the deal that it wanted through the TXShare Cooperative Purchasing Program by the North Central Texas Council of Governments, link here. The result? An RFP that Fairview was able to help construct, with bidding responses evaluated by TXShare and a cooperative contract for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) solutions for diverse water distribution systems that other cities will be able to utilize, as well.

For Fairview, this has already resulted in a deal signed with one of the contract’s pre-vetted vendors and a pilot program has started involving a Fairview neighborhood with 125 water meters.

“One of the big advantages to cooperative purchasing like this is that you can anticipate you're going to get better pricing,” says Couch, “because the vendors are anticipating multiple contracts ultimately coming from these cooperative purchasing arrangements.”

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