Report 2022-120 Recommendation 3 Responses

Report 2022-120: Orange County Power Authority: Increased Board Oversight Is Needed to Improve Its Operations (Release Date: February 2023)

Recommendation #3 To: Orange County Power Authority

To ensure that OCPA acts in its customers' best interests when contracting for services, by September 2023 OCPA's board should strengthen its procurement processes by requiring staff to maintain documentation of the evaluations that they perform of responses to competitive bidding processes, regardless of the dollar amount of the proposal or contract.

60-Day Agency Response

Staff has created an OCPA RFP Evaluation Template to document the process of soliciting, reviewing, and evaluating proposals, as well as the results of proposal evaluations and vendor selection. The purpose of this template is to strengthen the agency's procurement processes with respect to competitive bidding by requiring staff to maintain documentation of the evaluations.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Fully Implemented

OCPA's most recent version of its procurement policy, approved June 21, 2023, reiterates the requirements for evaluating contractor proposals that we identified during our audit. OCPA also provided us with a proposal evaluation template that describes procedures for individual staff and a selection committee to follow when reviewing and scoring contractor proposals. Further, OCPA provided us with a recent example of the template being used to select a contractor that was subsequently recommended to OCPA's board. To the extent OCPA follows the evaluation requirements in its policy and the procedures it provided to us, it will be better positioned to demonstrate whether it has acted in its customers' best interests when contracting for external services.

All Recommendations in 2022-120

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.