I thought I would talk a little bit about the Aquatic Center contract with the YMCA.  The main points are that council had the opportunity to go back and compare the cost of the current contract with the YMCA with the fixed price bid we got from Dayton Pool five years ago.  This comparison would have given us confidence in our current arrangement.  But no one on council asked for that comparison, so none of them know if we could have saved money or not.  The other point is that council should be directing the City Manager to keep track of all the extra money the city is putting in by doing the maintanence internally.  You can listen to me talk in the video below, or you can save a little time and look at the transcript below.  



All right, good evening this is Tom McMasters.  I figure I'll talk a little bit while I'm on my drive home.

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What I'm going to talk about today is the

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Aquatic Center contract between the YMCA and

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Huber Heights

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It's what was discussed in the last work session and it looks like they're going to award it

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to the YMCA at the next meeting.

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There's a couple things that caught my attention to this. As you might know from

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The write-up there's gonna be another no bid contract and that gets a lot of attention.

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So that's one of the reasons I put it up up there.

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Most of the reasons why I'm going to talk about this today is because

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The council is again. Losing the opportunity

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to

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demonstrate

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Good way to

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Actually conduct business within the city.

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Even if there wasn't a bid out there,

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It makes good sense for them to go out and to get other people to to make an offer.

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One of the points that I wanted to make

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in this video

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is that

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we had

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gone out last time and got

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Dayton polls to to submit an offer

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During the bidding process five years ago. With that

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council should have in this debate gone and

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compared

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what the contract would cost the city

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compared to what It did cost the city with the contract that they actually had awarded to the YMCA. All right, so we had the opportunity

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to

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go ahead and make that comparison and they've chosen not to.

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so that's one of the points that I

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Will talk to or at least have in my head and the other thing that caught my attention

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during this past meeting was that the city manager talked about all the work that the city has done on

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the Aquatic Center over the past year year and a half that doesn't appear to be

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tracked within the

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Operational budget. So that when they talk about the city spending $11,000 -

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from general fund to maintain the

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Aquatic Center, they're not talking about all the extra money that they've put in

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by the city performing maintenance itself.

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So there's a couple of things about that particular item that

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I'd like to talk about because generally when I look at the

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Aquatic Center and I compared it to the old pool that was on fish burg.

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I've always said that the city was doing a really good

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job in providing the service for

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Its residents with the Aquatic Center compared to the pool. And if you just look at the difference between what those amenities were

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Then you would know.  Then add on to that that the city was spending

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probably about

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$20,000 a year in

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additional funds to maintain that pool because it was in bad shape.

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It had a lot of leaks and they didn't charge very much to get in.  So

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as residents it was costing about $20,000 in general fund money

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to maintain that pool.

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Whereas

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when you talk in the aquatic center

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It cost

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$11,000 or so this past year.

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You know that's less than

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what it was costing to have the old pool. 
 And you certainly have a much nicer facility for residents to go to.

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Now the cost to get into the Aquatic Center compared to the cost get a pool, is different.

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You take that into consideration. Some people may not think it's a great value but in general for a taxpayer that

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wouldn't use either of those things. It seems to me that it was better to have

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the Aquatic Center over the pool.

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Now

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we've gotten into the situation where

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the city is providing a lot of the maintenance for

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the

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Aquatic Center and

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they're not going out and tracking those expenditures.  They're not charging.   They're not showing it on the books.

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So you're not doing an apples to apples comparison again.  If they've spent

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twenty thousand dollars in man-hours or twenty thousand dollars in

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equipment.

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Actually equipment probably would get tracked one way or another.

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It might be hard to find,

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but if they went out and bought paint

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somewhere that paint should be shown in the city budget as a pool expense.  but

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if they put a man hours into the aquatic center, and they have

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$20,000 man-hours it

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may not be very easy to find.

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So you don't know how the comparison goes anymore. So I

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was kind of disappointed that your council members did not

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tell the city manager that it was required that as part of the evaluation of the Aquatic Center.

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He has to do a better job with reporting the

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cash that's being spent on some of these other things outside of

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the

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YMCA. So that's one of the things that I talked about.  The other things that I

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talked about is process. Why you go through a bidding process or at least

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ask other companies to tell you how much it would cost to run the facilities. Alright so last time.

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One of the trepidations I have with that system right there, is last time, I was able to get Dayton pool to offer a bid

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and

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unfortunately,

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our city manager was upset that

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he had to evaluate two different bids.

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Where we had a pretty good relationship with

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Dayton pool,

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after that not so much and so we lost some of the services that that company provided,

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simply because they chose to participate and offering a bid. But the main point that I wanted to talk about is

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council and their

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loss of an opportunity to be able to judge whether

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they're making good decisions or not.

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Five years ago, we had Dayton Pool put in a proposal and we had the YMCA put in a proposal.

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The Dayton pool proposal was a firm fixed price.

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So, you know how much they were going to charge you each year for the services that they were going to provide.  You didn't know

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how much the YMCA was going to provide because

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the way that they did it is, if they used more

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Chlorine, they would charge more money. Whereas the Dayton

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pool told you up front what it was going to charge.

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Because we picked

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The YMCA, you can go back and compare

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what would it cost to have Dayton pool to what it actually did cost for the YMCA.

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You didn't have a single member of council go to

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your city manager and say, "hey

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how do those compare?  Did we do better by picking the YMCA

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then we would have with Dayton pool or not."   That just seems to be

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kind of a foul

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as far as I'm concerned, if they are not going to go back there and do that comparison and

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again.

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They have chosen to do a no-bid contract to the YMCA this time.

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So you don't know five years from now when they go ahead and

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do a re-compete, how the city is doing compared to what it would have done.

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What the other providers could have provided in that term.  So I

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again call foul with the way the council has decided that it's going to proceed

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awarding the contracts.

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So I guess that generally sums up where I was going with this video and

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Thank you for your attention.

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Yes, ask from your council, thanks a lot.


Here is the Council discussion from the Dec 3, 2019 work session.