How do I contract with the City of Seattle? Until August 12, 2024, there was no simple answer to that seemingly simple question. Different departments had different procurement systems for the three main buckets of contracts: public works, consulting, and purchase of goods and services. Those bids were in turn located on different websites, not centralized in a single public-facing portal.
When faced with that query from a prospective new vendor, says Julie Salinas, Procurement Program Manager for Purchasing and Contracting, “I’d have to ask [them] a lot of questions and give a long answer [about which pathway to choose].”
What changed in August was the rollout of the City of Seattle Procurement Portal. Now every City bid request can be found in a one-stop shop, from the purchase of metal shipping containers to engineering services for a new Northwest Native Canoe Center Carving House in Lake Union Park.
OpenGov powers the new procurement portal. It’s a cloud-based software provider for governments that offers solutions for procurement, among other public sector needs like budgeting, permitting and financials. The City of Seattle’s Finance and Administrative Services (FAS) Department had experimented with electronic bidding as far back as 2018. With the receipt of the $1 million Bloomberg Procurement Transformation Grant, FAS was able to invest in a comprehensive software platform with one goal in mind: “We could put the needs of the vendor community and the city departments at the forefront,” says Salinas.
After conducting interviews and trying demos with 10 different potential services, FAS settled on a five-year, no-guarantee contract with OpenGov because of its expertise in government. “OpenGov is predominantly focused on public sector procurement — they really understood records, retention, purging and other legal requirements,” says Salinas.
Since the portal launched in August, 2,800 vendors have activated their accounts in OpenGov. 23 solicitations are currently open.
Among the eager early adopters is Bellevue-based MidMountain Contractors, which specializes in utility and roadwork. The firm estimates the City of Seattle accounts for 15-20% of its overall business, with subcontractor roles on projects like the Elliott Bay Seawall and the Broad Street Substation.
But landing those jobs previously required a time- and labor-intensive bidding process. Bids had to be submitted on paper and delivered by hand to City offices, typically running 25-30 pages. That requirement led to frantic last-minute scrambling as a MidMountain staffer would sometimes have already arrived in the city office in question ahead of the deadline and take a phone call from MidMountain’s office in order to pencil in prices for the last handful of bid item numbers.
The City began accepting email bids in 2020, and both vendors and contractors are relieved to leave the paper era behind. “Bids took up so much room in our offices,” says Salinas. “We’d put them in a folder and never think about them again. Now we have everything at the tip of our fingers.”
MidMountain’s Vice-President Jared Koestler praises OpenGov for its automated calculations, which will calculate totals based on unit prices he and his team input into a spreadsheet. That feature alone is a major time saver for his firm.
While MidMountain already had an OpenGov account because some of its smaller clients, like Pierce County, use the platform, he views the City of Seattle’s adoption as a potential watershed moment for public sector procurement.
“I hope Seattle pulling the trigger forces the industry to say it’s time to modernize,” says Koestler.
Read our other stories about promising practices in Seattle’s work to make City contracting more efficient, results-driven, equitable, and strategic:
- How Seattle Public Utilities’ On-Call Contracts Give Smaller Engineering Firms a Foot in the Door
- Concrete Results: How Procurement Office Hours Open Doors for Small Businesses
- Seattle City Light leans into efficiencies, time savings in contracting
- Audit Your Way to the Top: How Seattle IT Maximized WMBE Spending
- No Drill Sergeant Required: How Public Art Boot Camp Helps Early Career Artists Get in Shape
- On Ramps: How the Seattle Department of Transportation Shook Up Business as Usual in Public Engagement Contracts
- Dashing to Results: New FAS Dashboard Improves Procurement Efficiency
- Panels as Pathways: How ARTS Turns Grant Review into an Art Form
- Open Door Policy: How networking events and “warm handoffs” help Seattle recruit and retain WMBE vendors
- Found in translation: How Seattle created a centralized system to manage translation
Seattle participated in the Bloomberg Philanthropies I-teams Procurement Cohort, a $1 million, two-year grant by Bloomberg Philanthropies to help transform our approach to buying. The Procurement Transformation project is a partnership between the Seattle Department of Finance and Administrative Services (FAS) and the Mayor’s Innovation and Performance Team, with technical assistance from the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab (GPL) and coaching calls from the Bloomberg Public Center for Innovation at Johns Hopkins University (BCPI). The project aims to transform City procurement to be more efficient, results-driven, equitable, and strategic. As part of this, the City is highlighting a multi-part series of stories that demonstrate citywide promising practices that can better support our WMBEs.