Educational facility managers take note:
BCCA drives change in public procurement practices creating difficulties in any opportunities to reduce future costs or stabilize resourcing of capital asset management functions. This lack of foresight often causes waste in spending, and therefore causes fiscal restraint – thereby preventing adequate planning of pending capital projects by owners, increasing costs and reducing effectiveness of service delivery. The public sector must provide adequate funding for pre-planning operation to prevent these oversights and mismanagement in the future.
The Capital Asset Management Framework (CAMF) was established in 2002 with the best of intentions – improving competition and transparency, and strengthening accountability within the public procurement process. However, haphazard application of the Framework left B.C.’s construction sector with questions about the Province’s commitment to those ideals. It looks like answers – and improvements – may be close at hand. Calling for a long-term infrastructure plan in an opinion paper published in January 2013 entitled Fair and Transparent: Implementing the CAMF for Construction Procurement, the British Columbia Construction Association (BCCA) took a big step forward to resolve these issues. Within Fair and Transparent, the BCCA outlined its ideals for the planning, execution, operation and disposal of capital assets in the B.C. public sector – calling for implementation of the Framework as true government policy and a set of structured rules and the need for a formal means of industry input on provincial infrastructure planning. Then, at the BCCA Construction Summit on January 25th, 2013, the provincial government and the BCCA announced their commitment to a new Infrastructure Forum that would work to resolve the issues and move industry procurement practices forward. What follows is an outline some of the key issues as identified in Fair and Transparent, with details on the new Infrastructure Forum. CAPITAL PLANNING Long-term planning is too often overlooked, particularly in the B.C. provincial public sector, hindering counter-cyclical spending when stimulus is needed and costs are low, and also 12
Ops Talk • Spring 2013
COMPETITION AND TRANSPARENCY Current practice in public sector procurement is out of line with the construction industry. The CAMF principles demand open, fair, and transparent construction procurement practices, but the lack of application increases the potential for higher construction costs when bidders and competition are restricted. The social and economic benefits of a strong construction industry are a considerable contributor to the province’s wellbeing. Binding government policy must be implemented as policy to ensure procurement is competitive and transparent – this same condition must be applied to local and provincial government, eliminating the “bundling” of projects, and with much greater attention paid to local conditions when projects are packaged. PREFERENCE OF PROCUREMENT APPROACH Current practice within the provincial government has created a prejudice toward the design-build procurement approach. However, the BCCA believes that public procurement practice should avoid the “one size fits all” mentality. The BCCA calls for unbiased criteria in choosing the procurement approach; this must be included in binding government policy, to allow design-build, design-bid-build, construction management or other approaches to suit the current market, opportunities and projects. OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY The current structure in the Framework is based on audits. This has, again, been rendered ineffective for two reasons: because CAMF is implemented as a guideline and not upheld as policy, and because too few audits have been performed (with too few of these being performed independently). Independent performance audits must be implemented on
