Louer Facility Planning awarded Madison County bid
By RANDY PIERCE
Louer Facility Planning, located at 1604 Eastport Plaza in Collinsville, has been awarded a bid for providing workstations to the Madison County State’s Attorney’s office at a total cost of $34,621.93.
A resolution approved unanimously regarding this transaction at the Madison County Board meeting held on Sept. 17 indicates there were four bids received, with Indoff LLC of Alhambra submitting one for $27,309 while two others submitted came from Office Essentials of St. Louis ($29,974) and Egyptian Workspace Partners of Belleville ($40,238).
To be paid for out of the state’s attorney’s administration fund, the need for the workstations was discussed by Stephanie Seehausen, that department’s office manager, at a meeting of the county board judiciary committee held in early September. Seehausen explained that the six workstations, needed to be updated due to their age and diminishing usefulness, and are located in the child support part of that office.
This item had also appeared on the judiciary committee agenda in August, but was not acted upon at that time. It was then that State’s Attorney Tom Haine responded to a question that the Louer bid was being recommended as the lowest “responsible” one as allowed by state regulations. This provision had been adopted so that government units such as the county were given the option of determining which bid, in such cases, would best meet their needs rather than being compelled to simply accept the lowest one.
Haine, noting that his office has been “doing a progressive replacement and modernization” over the last few years, said this somewhat staggered approach, rather than being undertaken all at once, has been taken because only re-appropriated funds remaining from other parts of the budget where expenses occurred below estimated expectations were designated for this purpose.
“So, when we’re under budget in one previous year,” Haine explained, “then we use some of those funds for ongoing replacement of desks that, frankly, should have been replaced 10, 15, 20 years ago.”
“We want to look like a professional law firm and so we’ve been doing this over the last few years. This is the final sort of section of offices that we’re replacing these desks in,” Haine said further.
When the bids were called for, according to Haine, “We had very specific requirements because we want them to be interoperable. If we have a desk from one office that’s broken, but a cabinet (and their kind of units) from another office that’s not broken, we can, over the years, combine them if we need to.”
The Louer price quote, he added, “is not the highest bid but it’s also not the lowest bid but it is the bid that allows for that interoperability. That will be better in the future and potentially save money. So that’s why we’re doing it.”
Rather than characterizing this scenario as consisting of a specific brand requirement, Haine said, “It was really the basic structure of the desk was just slightly different. It also had different materials and so it just wasn’t going to be a good fit (if one of the other bids would be accepted).”
Randy Pierce is a reporter for publications owned by Better Newspapers Inc., the parent company of the Illinois Business Journal.
