Winning bidder objects after contract gets held up.

A large telecommunications company that was close to winning a contract from the city of Los Angeles is complaining that interference from a City Council committee chaired by Councilman Jack Weiss steered the work to a rival.

Three months ago, city staff had recommended the three-year contract to install voice and data communications at the new public works building go to Avaya Inc., which came out on top in a bidding process that included rivals SBC Communications Inc. and Verizon Communications.

Instead of approving the contract, the council committee raised questions and told city staff to revise the request for bids.

After another round of bidding, city staff again recommended Avaya. But seven days later, after additional input from city departments and the council's Information Technology and General Services Committee, staff members in the city's Information Technology Agency decided there was not enough time for Avaya to complete the wiring of the new building by a late August move-in deadline.

The entire proposal was scrapped, and the city is now trying to find a way to give the work to SBC and Cisco Systems Inc. by shoehorning it into an existing SBC contract.

"Avaya has stood ready to contract and complete the work on a timely basis since the end of March, as it still does today," Avaya Vice President Phillip Castillo wrote in a May 13 letter to Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn.

The committee, he continued, "took a deliberative and well-documented RFP and replaced it with a process that has been at best chaotic. This has resulted in a proposed project which none of the bidders at this point understand at a cost to the city that no one can readily identify."

Avaya officials are particularly upset that no one at the city checked to see if the firm, a spin-off from Lucent Technologies that is based in Basking Ridge, N.J., could meet an accelerated schedule.

"No one ever approached us and said time constraints prevented the city from contracting with us," said Avaya spokesman Scott Horne.

Weiss said what the committee did was proper, that it debated the timing issues extensively and that the debate is on the public record. "What you have is a letter from a disgruntled bidder," he said.

During three lengthy committee hearings on the contract, questions arose over the ability of Avaya or any contractor to complete the work on time. There was also considerable skepticism from the councilmembers about the ITA's contracting procedures. Just last month, City Controller Laura Chick came out with an audit sharply critical of the way the ITA has handled cable contracts.

The wiring contract is worth $2.2 million, compared with Avaya's more than $4 billion in annual revenues. However, it generated intense interest because it's for one of the first city buildings slated to be wired for Voip, or voice over Intemet protocol, which allows both phone calls and data transmission to be carried over computer network connections. The contract is considered a pilot project for eventually wiring many of the city's buildings for the less-expensive Voip service.

August move-in

Thera Bradshaw, ITA's general manager, noted that "the city always reserves the right to cancel an RFP. That's implicit any time you place a bid."

To date, no wire has been installed in the 10-story building at 1149 S. Broadway, which the city purchased last year for $35 million. The public works staff is scheduled to begin moving into the building at the end of August; unless the wiring job is complete, they will have no phone service when they move in.

Bradshaw said the ITA is looking at existing contracts with SBC and Cisco. One is an SBC contract with the California Multiple Award Schedule program. Another is a supply contract that SBC has with the city's Department of Water & Power.

The council committee first raised questions about a proposed call center for the Department of Sanitation that was part of the original request for proposals on the wiring project, said Lisa Hansen, Weiss's spokeswoman. She said the city was planning to overhaul all its call centers to fully integrate them into the 311 information system launched three years ago. (The system allows residents to dial 311 and be connected to the appropriate city agency.)

"It made no sense to build a new call center and then have to revamp it in the next year or two," Hansen said.

Councilman Bernard Parks, who is also a member of the committee, said he didn't want the city to commit itself to a specific call-center contractor just before it embarked on an overhaul.

The committee ordered the ITA to re-evaluate the proposals without the call-center component. The recommendation came backed unchanged: Avaya on top, SBC in second and Verizon in third place.

But during hearings on the matter, Acting Chief Legislative Analyst Gerald Miller suggested scrapping the new contract and trying to get the work done under an existing one. A few days later, on April 29, the ITA did just that, sending a notice out to all the bidders that the contract was being canceled.

Hansen said that the committee, which also included Councilman Eric Garcetti, had expressed concern that as a new city vendor, Avaya would have to go through additional city paperwork that would take at least four weeks.

Bradshaw adds that the committee's earlier decision to drop the call center from the RFP changed the bid request, "essentially canceling the RFP."

"Based on existing contracts, she said, "We concluded that the SBC/Cisco team was the best option to do a pilot project for the city."

As of last week, the city still has not settled on which pre-existing contract for the wiring. Bradshaw said she is still confident the work will be done by Aug. 26.