Letter to the Editor: Local economic development groups should have chosen to keep furniture purchase local

Local economic development groups — the Great River Economic Development Foundation, The District, and Quincy Area Chamber of Commerce — recently made a joint purchase of a building at 501 Hampshire.

The purchase makes sense. If you explore the websites of each organization, their missions are to keep our local economy vibrant. The building needs some updating, requiring a substantial investment. Part of that included a sizeable amount of office furniture. Three companies, owned and operated in Quincy, sell and install office furniture. Each has completed projects much larger than this one.

The bid document wisely stated that “alternate selections are welcomed” — which is important, especially since none of the local dealers handle the specified furniture brands.  I called the leader of one of these organizations and received verbal encouragement to quote an alternate brand. He literally told me that the organization wanted to keep true to its mission of supporting local companies. 

Our company took the path of quoting an alternate brand since we wanted to provide the most competitive proposal.  We also didn’t have access to the same pricing for the specified brands that the that the non-local dealers do.

The bid we submitted for an alternate brand was around $70,000, but we were subsequently asked to revise our bid and not quote any alternates.  This is when I shared that we couldn’t supply one of the brands because that brand only sells to its existing dealers. The local organization then chose a substitute brand option to see how that would look.

Our revised bid was submitted in the $107,000 range, since certain brand names carry far higher price points.  The lowest bid for specified brands was around $8,500 lower than ours, and a St. Louis vendor was chosen by the leadership committee. 

Shortly afterward, I was told the project was already over budget. In the private sector, that budget pressure would only further result in someone truly considering alternative brands (ours was of similar quality and finishes to the specified brands.) In this instance, we were not given the opportunity to show samples or provide customer references.

We also were told the reason we were given that second chance instead of them choosing to “reject the bid outright” (an odd comment since the bid document welcomed alternatives and that same person is who encouraged quoting accordingly) was that because we were local.

We are used to “you win some, you lose some,” and we are comfortable with that. We win many more than we lose.

The difficulty I have with this, however, is that in spite of the clear missions of these organizations being to foster the local economic environment, they opted to specify and buy brands that were difficult to impossible for local vendors to provide.

To make things worse, two of Quincy’s three local office furniture dealers did not even get asked to quote the project, even though all three of us were members of the organizations at the time.

Some of us are no longer going to be members of the organizations going forward. My company alone donates tens of thousands of dollars each year to groups in our communities. Our record growth has created many very good jobs, and we continue to grow the sales tax base. Had any local vendor been chosen, this would have had an entirely different feel. 

But that’s not the case.

Accordingly, I cannot fathom why they chose not to keep this project local.

Ken Sparrow Jr.
General Manager, Area Distributors
Quincy, Illinois