With Pavilion, public entities in New York can now quickly discover single-award contracts to satisfy their piggybacking compliance requirements.
The special need to find single-award cooperative contracts
Over the last few months, Pavilion has received a barrage of requests from public entities in New York looking for help identifying single-award contracts. As one County-level procurement user wrote: “In New York, we are only authorized to purchase off of single-award contracts. I have to do a lot of digging to see if contracts are single or multi-award.”
Why the sudden change? Recently, the State of New York Office of the State Comptroller released guidance for piggybacking to New York local entities. The guidance references General Municipal Law 103 (and related case law) applicable to New York State political subdivisions, which states that in order to piggyback on a contract, the contract must have been “let to the lowest responsible bidder” or, in the case of a best value process, “an award to the responsive and responsible offerer.”
Since “bidder” and “offerer” are singular, the guidance has caused many New York entities to avoid using multi-award cooperative contracts, where one solicitation results in awards to multiple participating suppliers.
Local entities have also been cited by the Office of the Comptroller for piggybacking on multi-award cooperative contracts. In one instance, a school district was cited for piggybacking on a contract with a vendor who was one of 132 of 152 bid respondents awarded a roofing contract by a purchasing cooperative.
Making it easier to find single-award cooperative contracts
While many cooperative purchasing organizations create both single and multi-award contracts, most don’t make it easy to see which contracts in their portfolios are single-award. At time of writing, only OMNIA Partners had created a page for NY-based buyers of their single-award contract portfolio.
Now, Pavilion makes it easy to search across more than 100,000 active cooperative contracts from over 400 sources and easily filter results by single-award contracts.
“This new filter is so helpful for local public entities in New York. Pavilion already saved us time by collecting contracts from across many different sources, and now being able to see all single-award contracts in one place saves even more time,” says Paul Brennan, Director of Purchasing at County of Rockland, New York.
To see only single-award contracts in your search results on Pavilion, simply enter your search, then under “More filters,” select “Show only single-award contracts.”
Note that many entities in New York are separately authorized to utilize GSA contracts. To see results by GSA contracts, turn off your filter for single-award contracts, select the “Contract source” filter, and select “General Services Administration (GSA).”
