Corbett Signs Bid-Limit Bill For Township Advertising

Gov. Tom Corbett signed a bill Thursday raising the threshold for the minimum amount that townships seeking bids for purchases and contracts would have to advertise for. Effective Jan. 1, Act 84 of 2011 will increase the minimum dollar amount that requires townships to advertise and seek bids for purchases and contracts from $10,000 to $18,500.

According to a release issued by the Pa. State Association of Township Supervisors (PSATS), the law means that fewer local purchases will fall under the state’s cumbersome and bureaucratic bidding procedures and more local tax dollars will be invested where they would do the most good – in local services and projects.

“PSATS applauds the governor’s swift action in signing this legislation,” PSATS Executive Director David M. Sanko sais. “For more than a decade, the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors has been urging lawmakers to pass common-sense legislation that would save municipalities statewide hundreds of thousands of tax dollars a year – money that could be put to better use in Pennsylvania’s communities.

According to PSATS, before now bidding provisions haven't been ammended since 1990, not allowing for inflation and eroding the purchasing power of township government. PSATS claims that increasing the bidding threshold will make procurement more cost-effective and provide more choices for townships and taxpayers.

In addition to increasing the municipal bid threshold, Act 84 requires townships to seek telephone quotes for purchases and contracts between $10,000 and $18,500. Any purchase a township makes that costs less than $10,000 will not be subject to the state’s bidding and advertising requirements. The minimum bid amounts will also be adjusted annually based on changes in the Consumer Price Index.

According to Norristown Municipal Manager Dave Forrest, while the bill would mean less red tape and some savings for Norristown, most of the projects advertised for bid in the municipality are well past the $18,500 threshold.

"If you have a project that's between [$10,000 and $18,500] and you don't have to bid it, that saves some money," said Forrest. But he couldn't offer any specifics on how much savings Norristown might see. "It just depends on how many projects the municipality has within that range."

Forrest suggested that the savings might not be as significant as one would hope.

"Most municipal road programs are hundreds of thousands of dollars," he said. "We're putting in a new transformer – that's $165,000; $18,000 is a relatively small project. My guess is the law might result in some minimum savings. We'll just have to see."

Norristown has already been able to find savings where advertising is concerned by amending its own charter in 2009 to allowing for summaries of ordinances to be advertised rather than the full text.

"Previously, the charter said that you had to print every word of the ordinance in the newspaper twice – once before you adopted it and then after," said Forrest. "Now all we have to do is print a summary and then provide notice that there's a copy of the full ordinance available for review. It made a lot of sense to do that."

This small change resulted in savings of more than $25,000 in 2010 alone. (According to municipal records, Norristown spent $32,888.48 in 2008 on legal advertising in ; $37,284.50 in 2009; and only $11,877.32 in 2010 after enacting the change to the charter.)

Mandated advertising in newspapers continues to be a contentious issue in Pennsylvania. Politicians in Harrisburg attempted to relax the rules requiring local governments to buy legal advertising earlier this year, but received significant push back from the newspaper industry. Local governments had expressed a wish to be able to advertise notices and meetings on the web, which they say could save taxpayers millions of dollars a year and provide convenience for a generation of citizens who are increasingly computer savvy.

The proposed bill, HB 633, would have allowed school boards and government agencies to publish legal notices online instead of in newspapers as long as the website was registered with the state, linked to the government agency's site and accessible at least 98% of the time.

The bill is still up before the House Local Government Committee but has not been voted on.