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Connor Lewis
State College
One of the most important jobs of local and county government is to make sure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. Centre County government is no different, and county officials and staff have to work hard to responsibly manage the more than $100 million dollar budget.
But there are a lot of ways that county and local governments are prevented from doing this job well, and one of them is Pennsylvania's requirement that county and local governments take the lowest bid on construction projects, no matter the bidder or their project history. The result is that local governments have no ability to use common sense and make sure that they're getting both the lowest cost, and best value for the cost, when awarding bids.
There's no sense in giving work to the "lowest" bid, when you know the contractor will run over budget, default on the project, or produce poor quality work, creating more costs for taxpayers. If you're hiring a contractor for a home renovation, you're not going to hire the contractor that messed up your neighbor's deck so much they had to hire another contractor to fix it.
Centre County's proposed responsible contractor ordinance will give more local control for county government to make sure that when taxpayer dollars are spent on big capital projects, they're spent on getting the best value for our dollars. We should join counties like Bucks, Lehigh, Westmoreland and Dauphin, and make sure county government can spend our dollars wisely.