LA City Manager Featured in New National Survey

by Charley Mims
LAPMA President
Russell Strazzella
, a fellow member of the Los Angeles Professional Managers’ Association affiliated with SEIU 721, is featured with a quote in a new report by the National Employment Law Project that surveys state and local responsible contracting policies that create good jobs and deliver quality services, and recommends reforms at the federal level.
Released this summer, The Road to Responsible Contracting: Lessons from States and Cities for Ensuring That Federal Contracting Delivers Good Jobs and Quality Services examines our city’s contractor responsibility program:

Los Angeles adopted a comprehensive “responsible contractor policy” in 2000. Like the state policies discussed, it directs city agencies to review potential bidders’ history of labor, employment, environmental and workplace safety violations, and uses a detailed questionnaire asking bidders to disclose and explain past and pending litigation, past contract suspensions, and outstanding judgments. Full transparency is a key feature of the Los Angeles policy
, which makes bidders’ responses to the questionnaire subject to public review. This allows the public to assist the agency in its review process by providing relevant information that the applicants may not have volunteered. A catalog of responsible contractor and prequalification laws from across the nation is available from the National Alliance for Fair Contracting.

As Russell Strazzella
, a Chief Construction Inspector for the Los Angeles Bureau of Contract Administration explained, “[front end responsibility screening] is more effective and more beneficial to the public than a reactionary system. When you get a bad contractor on the back end, they’ve already done the damage, and then it’s a costly process of kicking them out. On the other hand, if you have a very strong prequalification system that can be vigorously enforced and a uniform system of rating bidders that is published–so everyone knows where they stand before they compete–then you get a level playing field and a pool of [better] contractors.”

In addition to the responsible contractor policy, LAMPA members have worked with SEIU 721 to win strong contract language that sets specific guidelines for contracting out of services and encourages work to be contracted back to city employees.
Responsible contracting policies of California and San Francisco are also noted in The Road to Responsible Contracting from the National Employment Law Project, which promotes policies to create good jobs, enforce workplace rights and help unemployed workers regain their economic footing.
Check out the report by downloading a copy of The Road to Responsible Contracting >>