Fair Bidding

I recently dealt with a vendor who was irritated for being left out of a fair bidding process for a government project. The project under question was a building that the city was planning to heat and cool with a heat pump system. The vendor's complaint was based on the fact that he did not sell heat pump equipment, but instead, sold another type of HVAC equipment. This provides a situation representative of a large policy question - how does a government entity allow for fair bidding practices that allow all interested parties to compete on an even field without taking exorbitant time and resources for the bidding process itself?

In this particular situation, a heat pump was the best system for the building's end use. So how does the government expedite their design process when the choice is evident?

One idea that came to me was for the government to maintain staff engineers and designers whose job it is to assess varying technologies for a given application and to provide a recommendation to the bidding group to limit the technologies to a short list. This may work, however, it may also provide the possibility for design preferences to systems that the staff engineers know well, creating a bias against new technologies.

Another idea is to request outside consulting to determine the best system for a given application, to achieve the goals of the first proposal, but with the opportunity to distribute work among many organizations and to allow for periodic refreshing of the reviewing engineers if a bias is observed. This work would also need to be bid, per the prior issue. This work, however, could be bid on annual (or other periodic) contracts rather than case by case, so individual projects couls still have a relatively short turnaround time.

I work in a company that specializes in energy efficiency measures, and may have a vested interest in this type of work being farmed to companies like mine, but in all honesty, there is a lot of work available in energy efficiency right now and I am not in particular need of more work just to keep ahead. I am more interested, as a citizen, in seeing my government operate effectively and use the best technology for a given application.

I do not know how issues like the one raised by this vendor are traditionally dealt with, but a fair system that can still work with expediancy would be good to see.