Licensing problems bog down school bus acquisition

In the need to provide the CNMI student population greater accessibility to schools, the Public School System is working to acquire more school buses despite the serious cash flow problems besetting the agency.

PSS, however, was forced to temporarily abandon its new vehicle acquisition program due to an assortment of problems, not the least of which was the licensing problems of its winning bidders.

The original bidding for PSS’ school bus requirement was released June 2004 and was closed Sept. 30, 2004 but until now not a single bus has been delivered to the PSS.

Associate commissioner David M. Borja said that PSS originally published a bid bulletin for three 66-capacity school buses and 22 passenger vans.

But the price of the expected number of passenger vans exceeded the PSS’ budget, and when PSS reviewed the bidding process, they found out they could actually only afford 14 passenger vans.

“When we went through the bid process, we made a decision based on the evaluation results and we gave notification out to three vendors that made the proposals,” said Borja.

He further added that PSS already had selected two bidders that were supposed to supply the three school buses and 14 passenger vans. PSS then immediately worked on hammering the final details of the contract.

But it encountered another hitch, when one of the losing vendors submitted a protest questioning the licenses of the winning bidders.

PSS quickly worked to remedy the situation and double-checked the backgrounds of the winning companies. They eventually ascertained that the winning vendors’ business license only allowed them to purchase parts of vehicles.

Now, the PSS is set to restart the entire bidding process for the school buses all over again and Borja is confident that lessons learned from past boo-boos will be heeded.

Borja explained that PSS made a big mistake by wrongly assuming that all vendors that participate in the bidding process have valid licenses to begin with. He assured that PSS would be more careful this time around.

“Once all our data are gathered, we will resume the whole bidding process. We will thoroughly review our findings and we will publish all are requirements for the benefit of our vendors,” he said. (Marconi Calindas)