From: Mario Rios [ ]
Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2025 4:53 PM
To: PSFSScommittee [[email protected]]
CC: District1 [[email protected]]; Fruen, Joseph [[email protected]]; District2 [[email protected]]; Yamamoto, KiyomiH [[email protected]]; District3 [[email protected]]; District4 [[email protected]]; District5 [[email protected]]; District 6 [[email protected]]; District7 [[email protected]]; Kolander, Grace [[email protected]]; District8 [[email protected]]; District9 [[email protected]]; District 10 [[email protected]]; [email protected]; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan [[email protected]]
Subject: Procurement Audit Report – Inability to Provide Accurate Data for Metrics for 58 RFPs
Thank you for the opportunity to provide public comments. ** This is regarding Procurement Audit Report, Page 26 - Purchasing’s current internal log records when they were first notified of a procurement, when it was assigned to a staff member, and when the contract was awarded. But some dates are missing, and the data is inconsistently entered by staff, making it harder to rely on.
PUBLIC COMMENTS
1. The data on which performance metrics were to be based was to be cleaned by the procurement unit starting October 2021 per former Finance Director Ms. Julia Cooper on October 7, 2021.
2. All this for a mere 58 requests for proposals (RFPs) which is not even a drop in the bucket by Silicon Valley data standards.
3. In the period from October 2021 through May 2025, the procurement unit could have easily captured meaningful data points pertaining to 58 RFPs without much effort.
4. It appears that not much seems to have changed in the four years since that meeting on October 7, 2021, as far as performance metrics are concerned. This is disappointing.
5. Four years ago, in October 2021, then-Finance Director Ms. Julia Cooper responded to Mayor Liccardo and then-Councilmember Mahan about performance [External Email. Do not open links or attachments from untrusted sources. Learn more] You don't often get email from . Learn why this is important
metrics and the data to compile performance metrics. Please see the exchange between Mayor Liccardo and Finance Director Ms. Julia Cooper below.
Also, please see the exchange between Mayor Liccardo and Deputy Director of Finance - Purchasing and Risk Management Ms. Jennifer Cheng, who avoids providing Mayor Liccardo any information regarding performance metrics.
6. Please navigate to You Tube and enter "San Jose Oct 7 Smart Cities Service Improvements Committee" in the search window.
7. Or, please see the Smart Cities & Service Improvements Committee meeting on October 7, 2021 by clicking on the link below.
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgH8TgUUwBM - OCT 7, 2021 | Smart Cities & Service Improvements Committee
9. 36m 09s mark
Finance Director Ms. Julia Cooper: And I would like to add, Mayor, as part of the work we want Guidehouse to do for us is to help look at some of those metrics and provide more visibility into where we are in the timeline especially related to some those more complex RFPs...but we definitely as we reach out to the departments ...wanting to know what are the appropriate metrics are so people can see into the system ...
10. 37m 3s mark
Finance Director Ms. Julia Cooper: So, we are hoping that the report that comes out from Guidehouse will help us enhance the metrics in terms of the performance of the program. 37m 13s mark
Mayor Liccardo: So, does that mean that you want to revise the metrics themselves or you’d like to revise the processes that are resulting in perhaps you not getting reliable data for these metrics.
11. 37m 30s mark
Finance Director Ms. Julia Cooper: I think it is a combination of both. I know where most of the frustration comes up from the departments and the Council is around some of those larger RFP procurements in which we do require a lot of subject-matter experts identified in assisting the Procurement Office in getting the work accomplished.
At the 39-minute mark, Mayor Liccardo asks, "Could we just look at what metrics you might have for cycle times? Is that something you would be prepared to discuss today or
would it be for another day?"
Deputy Director Ms. Jennifer Cheng, Purchasing and Risk Management, replied by saying, "I am not prepared to discuss that today. But we can certainly talk about that in the future if you'd like."
You may draw your own conclusions regarding Deputy Director of Finance Ms. Jennifer Cheng's response to Mayor Liccardo.
Mayor Liccardo pressed on, responding, "I think it would be helpful just to understand how we're measuring performance and how we're doing against those measurements."
12. Mayor Mahan has repeatedly stated his focus on performance metrics and data-driven decision-making. Silicon Valley has the technology to crunch petabytes of data and output vast amounts of guidance via artificial intelligence-based large language models, and yet the procurement unit appears to be unable to provide meaningful data for a mere 58 requests for proposals (RFPs), specifically, basic data points such as:
a. Date of notification by the City of San Jose department (Procurement Prioritization Board)
b. Date assigned to procurement staff
c. Date scope of work finalized
d. Date requisite exhibits obtained from Risk Management, the Information Technology Department, or the Office of Equality Assurance (most of them are boilerplate) e. Date request for X (x = proposals, quotes, bids) released for public bidding on Biddingo, the City of San Jose's online bidding portal - can be found on Biddingo within a minute f. Date of conclusion of evaluation
g. Date of award of contract
h. Date contract executed or purchase order issued i. Date bid cancelled. The metrics for cancelled bids which are re-released must be halved or reduced to 30% of the metric in terms of cycle times and performance expectations.
Source(s): Public Records Act requests fulfilled by the City of San Jose Data present on Biddingo, the City of San Jose's public-facing, online bidding portal GILES, the City of San Jose's repository for documents
San Jose City Council memoranda
You Tube videos posted by the City of San Jose on October 7, 2021, etc.
Thanks,
M
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From: Pedro Hernandez [
Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2025 5:34 PM
To: PSFSScommittee [[email protected]]
CC: District1 [[email protected]]; Fruen, Joseph [[email protected]]; District2 [[email protected]]; Yamamoto, KiyomiH [[email protected]]; District3 [[email protected]]; District4 [[email protected]]; District5 [[email protected]]; District 6 [[email protected]]; District7 [[email protected]]; Kolander, Grace [[email protected]]; District8 [[email protected]]; District9 [[email protected]]; District 10 [[email protected]]; [email protected]; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan [[email protected]]
Subject: Procurement Audit Report – New Dead-On-Arrival Perf. Metric
Hello,
Please see Procurement Audit Report, Page 15 - (New Dead-On-Arrival Performance Measure)
Starting in the FY 2025-26 Proposed Operating Budget,4 all purchase orders, regardless of dollar value, have a target of completion within 90 days. Nearly 95 percent of purchase orders met this target in FY 2024-25. It took 31 days on average to process a purchase order in FY 2024-25
Please see my public comments below.
a. With the new metric for purchase orders, which lowers the bar drastically from 8 business days and 26 business days to 90 calendar days for processing purchase requisitions from City departments into approved-for-purchase-from-vendor City of San Jose purchase orders, the performance standards for purchase orders appear to have been diluted significantly. b. The performance measures published before this new 90-day, catch-all performance measure are more accurate and will enable purchase requisitions to be processed in an expeditious manner. The earlier version of performance measures needs to be retained to provide better visibility and for transparency.
Less stringent, diluted metric in the Fiscal Year 2025-2026 Proposed Operating Budget [External Email. Do not open links or attachments from untrusted sources. Learn more] You don't often get email from . Learn why this is important
===================================================================== =
1. A new, less-stringent standard of "% of purchase orders to be processed and executed within 90 calendar days of receipt of department request" has been introduced by the procurement unit for Fiscal Year 2025-2026 as mentioned in the Procurement Audit Report released on August 14, 2025.
2. This new, diluted metric will defeat the very purpose of ensuring the expeditious issuance of purchase orders to procure goods and services for day-to-day, bread-and-butter type of tactical operations, including public safety-related operations carried out by the police department, the fire department, and various City of San Jose departments.
3. Fiscal Year 2024-2025 Adopted Operating Budget, page 559, reports performance measures based on normal, tiered criteria such as "% of purchase orders (POs) processed within established timeframes - 8 business days for POs ≤ $10K," showing that only 51% of purchase orders met this criterion, and "% of purchase orders (POs) processed within established timeframes - 26 business days for POs >$10K," which shows that only 77% of purchase orders met this criterion.
4. These performance measures were in effect since at least 2009 and portrayed a tiered, realistic picture of the performance measures for purchase orders in the City of San Jose operating budgets over the years.
5. A jump in procurement efficiency from 51% to 95% as mentioned in the Procurement Audit Report appears to have been achieved by moving the thresholds of the metrics of 8 business days and 26 business days to an extremely generous catch-all metric of 90 calendar days. Notably, this new metric of 90 calendar days, appears to be closer to the earlier metric of 108 days, the 108-day metric having been reserved in the earlier version of performance measures, as reported in the operating budget, only for purchase orders around or exceeding $1 million in value.
6. Now, this sole, diluted metric of 90 days will apply to all purchase orders and glowing figures for the inflated, artificial performance measure will be reported in the proposed and adopted operating budgets.
7. Basically, the blaring fire alarm of existing performance measures will be destroyed and replaced with a new, dead-on-arrival fire alarm while the procurement inefficiency fire continues to rage.
8. As for the statement of "nearly 95 percent of purchase orders met this target in FY 2024-25," the statement is inaccurate in that it does not consider the tens or hundreds of purchase requisitions cancelled in Fiscal Year 2024 - 2025 and readied for processing in the following fiscal year, FY 2025-2026, by the procurement unit, thus contributing to the figure of 95 percent.
Had these cancelled purchase requisitions been processed in the fiscal year they were entered by the various City of San Jose departments, Fiscal Year 2024-2025, the 95 percent figure would have, probably, dropped down to the consistent-in-prior-fiscal-years figure of 77%, not 95%.
9. Also, purchase requisitions which resulted in requests for quotes which were cancelled after being published for bidding and requests for bids which were cancelled after being published for bidding during Fiscal Year 2024-2025 are not accounted for in the 95% performance measure.
10. Based on the metrics for purchase orders in prior fiscal years, the procurement unit does not appear to have processed all the purchase requisitions entered by the various City of San Jose departments in Fiscal Year 2024-2025.
Thanks,
P~
Source(s): Public Records Act requests fulfilled by the City of San Jose Fiscal Year 2024-2025 Adopted Operating Budget
Fiscal Year 20xx – 20xx Adopted Operating Budget
Data present on Biddingo, the City of San Jose's public-facing, online bidding portal
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From: Pedro Hernandez [ ]
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2025 10:46 AM
To: PSFSScommittee [[email protected]]
CC: District1 [[email protected]]; Fruen, Joseph [[email protected]]; District2 [[email protected]]; Yamamoto, KiyomiH [[email protected]]; District3 [[email protected]]; District4 [[email protected]]; District5 [[email protected]]; District 6 [[email protected]]; District7 [[email protected]]; Kolander, Grace [[email protected]]; District8 [[email protected]]; District9 [[email protected]]; District 10 [[email protected]]; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan [[email protected]]
Subject: Procurement Audit Report – Cancelled Bids Must Be Included for Complete Picture
Hello,
Please see Procurement Audit Report - Page 10
Exhibit 4: Purchasing-Led Bids by Type (November 2019 – March 2025) - Note: Data includes awarded, closed, and cancelled bids, but does not include department-led consulting bids. Total number of bids 703.
COMMENTS
1. A procurement request, especially an urgent one, is a cry for help from the City of San Jose department in question in order to enable the City of San Jose department to serve residents, visitors, businesses, and travelers in an efficient manner, enhancing the customer experience.
2. Every cancelled bid signifies that the procurement unit failed to procure the goods and services pertaining to the bid and injected a major delay in the respective City of San Jose department's timeline to procure the goods and services. The procurement unit failed in terms of timeliness.
3. The total number of bids as of August 15, 2025, is 757, an increase over the 703 reported in the Procurement Audit Report.
4. What is concerning is that almost a third of the bids released for public bidding were cancelled by the procurement unit for various reasons. This is an unusually high number.
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Problems With Not Including Cancelled Bids
=================================
• The City of San Jose's online procurement portal, shows that of 757 bids released for public bidding since November 2019, a full 210 were cancelled. This is almost 30 percent or one in three bids released by the City of San Jose.
• The amount of time spent by City of San Jose procurement staff, bidders, and City of San Jose departments in terms of a dollar-based spend could amount to at least $300,000-$1,000,000, the latter including some of the larger requests for proposals (RFPs) and requests for quotes (RFQs) which were canceled halfway through the bidding process and re-released multiple times, possibly causing extreme bidding fatigue for bidders.
The bid cancellation notices appear to point to several structural issues:
1. Lack of knowledge about the San José Municipal Code and Title 4 (Procurement)
2. Insufficient training and resources provided to procurement staff
3. Insufficient training provided to the staff of the various City of San Jose departments leading to a dearth of knowledge regarding procurement procedures
4. Ambiguous instructions to bidders resulting in incomplete bids
5. Insufficient knowledge regarding bids requiring specialized knowledge/training so procurement staff asks the right questions
6. Not enough training in the industry domain or industry vertical to which the procurement pertains
7. Not enough cooperation between the procurement unit and the City of San Jose department requesting the goods and services
8. Incorrect/insufficient scope of work or incorrect/insufficient specifications or not enough subject-matter expertise to effect the procurement
9. Failed contract negotiations leading to the entire RFx (x = Q, B, P) being “abandoned”
10. Tens of thousands of dollars in wasted time and effort, costing the City of San Jose a significant amount of money in taxpayer dollars, and costing bidders tens of thousands of dollars in staff time to respond to City of San Jose bids which are ultimately cancelled. Many of these bidders will then choose not to bid on any City of San Jose bids, further reducing the pool of qualified bidders and exacerbating the situation in a self-perpetuating cycle.
Source(s): Data present on Biddingo, the City of San Jose's public-facing, online bidding portal
This message is from outside the City email system. Do not open links or attachments from untrusted sources.
From: Pedro Hernandez [ ]
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2025 11:01 AM
To: PSFSScommittee [[email protected]]
CC: The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan [[email protected]]; District1 [[email protected]]; Fruen, Joseph [[email protected]]; District2 [[email protected]]; Yamamoto, KiyomiH [[email protected]]; District3 [[email protected]]; District4 [[email protected]]; District5 [[email protected]]; District 6 [[email protected]]; District7 [[email protected]]; Kolander, Grace [[email protected]]; District8 [[email protected]]; District9 [[email protected]]; District 10 [[email protected]] Subject: Procurement Audit Report – RFPs Breached Metric of 9 Months > 90% - After Including Cancelled RFPs
Hello,
• This is regarding Procurement Audit Report, Page 14 - Purchasing’s expectation is that RFPs are completed within 6-9 months, from assignment to Purchasing staff through completion.
Based on internal data kept by Purchasing, three-quarters of the RFPs handled by Purchasing completed between 2019 and 2024 took longer than that. Nearly half took more than one year.
** Public Comment
Since Mayor Mahan has made it amply clear that he believes in data-driven visibility, I would like to ensure that data-driven conclusions are drawn for performance metrics related to the procurement unit.
• Actually, the number of requests for proposals (RFPs) which have breached the metric of 6- 9 months is much higher than 75%, and appears to be closer to 90%, with over 65% appearing to take more than one year, if cancelled RFPs are included.
================================================================== • Please refer to Procurement Audit Report, Page 15 - At the bottom of Exhibit 5 - Source:
Auditor analysis of Finance Purchasing’s internal strategic projects log. Data shows RFPs [External Email. Do not open links or attachments from untrusted sources. Learn more] You don't often get email from . Learn why this is important
completed between 2019 and 2024 with manually entered assignment and completion dates.
Data does not include RFPs that were canceled or closed or consulting agreements not handled or tracked by Purchasing
**Public Comments
1. The Procurement Audit Report should have included data pertaining to cancelled RFPs to obtain a more accurate picture of procurement cycle times, e.g., a software procurement for scheduling and managing community centers worth about $100,000 appears to have taken over 3 years and 4 months.
2. **EXAMPLE 1 - For example, Recreation Registration System, a request for proposals was assigned in March 2022 and released for public bidding in September 2022, only to be cancelled eight months later in May 2023. It was re-released for bidding in October 2023. An interim contract appears to have been executed as of June 2025. However, as of July 2025, based on information provided by the City of San Jose via a Public Records Act request, contract negotiations are still in progress.
3. Request for proposals (RFP) PUR-RFP2022.09.10115 Recreation Registration System, was released for bidding 09/30/2022 and cancelled 5/1/2023. A second attempt was made via RFP PUR-RFP2023.10.10126 Recreation Registration System, re-released for bidding on 10/20/2023.
4. In short, a software procurement for scheduling and managing community centers worth about $100,000 appears to have taken over 3 years and 4 months and the City department requesting the goods and services had to wait almost four years for a straightforward procurement of software.
5. The total time, translated into dollars, spent by procurement staff, multiple bidders and their respective staff, the staff of the City department requesting the goods and services, and other supporting staff appears to have surpassed a figure of over $200,000 over a period of almost 4 years. All for software worth about $100,000.
5. **EXAMPLE 2 - The procurement of a citywide video management solution appears to have begun in January 2023 with RFP PUR-RFP2023.06.10070 Citywide Video Management Solution released for bidding on 08/04/2023. The RFP was cancelled 6 months later in February 2024. The RFP then appears to have morphed into a procurement utilizing a cooperative agreement. As of July 2025, two and a half years later, a citywide video management solution is still in the process of being procured.
6. **EXAMPLE 3 - The procurement of a business tax system began in February 2021 with request for proposals (RFP) PUR-RFP2021.10.10128 Business Tax System and Optional Revenue Management Platform released for bidding on 10/29/2021. This RFP was cancelled in April 2022, only to be re-released for bidding as PUR-RFP2023.11.10146 Business Tax System on 12/08/2023. It was finally completed three and a half years later in June 2024.
7. **EXAMPLE 4 - A request for quotes (RFQ) which should have taken about 4-6 months, ended up taking two years and was eventually cancelled. Request for quotes (RFQ) PUR- RFQ2022.12.10165 Automated Software Development Life Cycle Management Solution worth $30,000 was assigned in January 2022, released for bidding a year later in January 2023 and, finally, cancelled in January 2024 after two years.
Source(s): Public Records Act requests fulfilled by the City of San Jose Data present on Biddingo, the City of San Jose's public-facing, online bidding portal GILES, the City of San Jose's repository for documents
San Jose City Council memoranda
Regards,
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From: Mario Rios [ ]
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2025 1:14 PM
To: PSFSScommittee [[email protected]]
CC: District1 [[email protected]]; Fruen, Joseph [[email protected]]; District2 [[email protected]]; Yamamoto, KiyomiH [[email protected]]; District3 [[email protected]]; District4 [[email protected]]; District5 [[email protected]]; District 6 [[email protected]]; District7 [[email protected]]; Kolander, Grace [[email protected]]; District8 [[email protected]]; District9 [[email protected]]; District 10 [[email protected]]; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan [[email protected]]
Subject: Procurement Audit Report – $3 Million Directly Awarded to Vendor, Bypassing Competitive Bidding
Dear Committee Members:
Please refer to Procurement Audit Report, Page 19
Authority to approve some sole source/unique services exceptions: Finance currently approves all requests for sole source, brand name, or unique services exceptions to competitive procurements. One option would be to allow department heads to approve some of these exceptions in limited circumstances, such as the continuation of an existing contract or software if its useful life extends beyond the original contract term.
Also, please refer to Procurement Audit Report, Page 10 The Municipal Code also establishes exceptions to competitive procurement, which are:
Emergency Purchases.
Cooperative Agreements – direct purchases from vendors made by leveraging the results of competitive procurement processes done by other public agencies.
Sole Source/Unique Services/Brand Name – goods or services only available from one vendor or instances where competitive procurement is not in the public’s interest.
PUBLIC COMMENTS
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1. This option of allowing department heads to bypass competitive bidding and approve no-bid purchase orders and no-bid contracts is fraught with risk and needs to be examined carefully, especially in light of recent no-bid purchase orders worth $3 million issued to vendor Seyon, LLC, which appears to be operating out of a residence in Sacramento per the City of San Jose’s purchase orders and Seyon, LLC’s invoices.
2. No-bid purchase orders and no-bid contracts bypassing competitive bidding can be a cause for concern, e.g., lack of transparency, negative public perception, potential for corruption and favoritism.
3. For example, at the City of San Jose, vendor Seyon, LLC, an entity which appears to be operating out of a residence in Sacramento, appears to have been awarded over $3 million in no- bid purchase orders by the procurement unit — for "unique services" which appear to be unjustifiable — from January 2024 through July 2025 and, possibly, beyond.
4. As of July 2025, Seyon, LLC appears to have billed the City of San Jose about $2.5 million for "unique services" (software professional services and basic accounting services) which, apparently, only Seyon, LLC appears to be able to provide per an interpretation of the purchase order approval forms provided by the City of San Jose.
5. Bypassing the competitive process and awarding over $3 million in no-bid purchase orders to an entity which appears to be operating out of a residence in Sacramento does not appear to be a good use of taxpayer dollars.
6. No-bid purchase orders and no-bid contracts also shut out local businesses and small businesses in San Jose.
7. The "unique services" do not appear to be so unique that they can be only be provided by one vendor, Seyon, LLC.
8. If the "unique services" determinations by the City of San Jose's procurement unit are to be believed, it would seem to appear that the services sought by the City of San Jose are so unique that even San Francisco Bay Area-based software giant Salesforce and its thousands of authorized partners are incapable of providing professional services (“Sr. Software Developer – Salesforce”) related to Salesforce's own software products.
9. I may be wrong and I am willing to be corrected, but Seyon, LLC does not appear to be a Salesforce partner or a part of the Salesforce Partner Program or among the 1059 authorized Salesforce partners located in the United States or among the 243 authorized Salesforce partners operating out of India which happens to be a preferred location for the outsourcing of software projects. This search was performed over several months in 2025.
10. https://findpartners.salesforce.com/ (Location = United States)
11. A competitive City of San Jose bid such as a request for proposals (RFP) blasted via email to the thousands of partners in the Salesforce ecosystem would have produced thousands of developers on the Salesforce platform at very competitive rates, especially given the current less- than-optimal conditions in the job market for Salesforce software developers or non-AI-related software developers.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/11/business/coding-students-whose-jobs-were-taken-by-ai-forced-to- work-at-chipotle/ (Coding Students Whose Jobs Were Taken by AI Forced to Find Work at Chipotle ) profiles a recent computer science major from Purdue University who now works at Chipotle.
12. As an example, Seyon, LLC, a staffing firm, billed the City of San Jose for the services of a “Sr. Software Developer – Salesforce.” Since the professional services from Seyon, LLC do not appear to have been procured as part of a competitive bidding process, the City of San Jose may wish to carry out a thorough evaluation.
13. As part of an exercise in due diligence, the City of San Jose may wish to check and evaluate the qualifications of the resources and evaluate their resumes, if it has not done so already. The City of San Jose may also wish to check to see if any relevant Salesforce certifications were obtained AFTER the City of San Jose was billed for the services of a “Sr. Software Developer – Salesforce.”
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/credentials/verification/
14. Salesforce certifications of the resources may also be verified by the City of San Jose to see if they are business functionality-specific, e.g., Agentforce certification obtained by a resource after the City of San Jose was billed for professional services related to Agentforce.
15. All the above verification would have been a part of the evaluation carried out as part of the (competitive) request for proposals (RFP) procurement process had the City of San Jose released an RFP for public bidding.
An RFP would have allowed the City of San Jose to compare pricing, evaluate the qualifications of staffing resources from multiple authorized Salesforce partners, examine resumes and experience, and negotiate competitive pricing. Also, multiple awards of contract as a result of a competitive RFP could have been made to tens of authorized Salesforce partners and the City of San Jose could have picked and chosen which Salesforce partner to bring on board for as-needed professional (software development) services depending on the functionality of the Salesforce platform being customized/developed/implemented.
https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?language=en_US&id=000386431&type=1
16. A check to verify that no conflict of interest exists must also be carried out by the City of San Jose. A competitive RFP would have forced everyone involved to adhere to the provisions of City Policy Manual, Section 5.1.1, Procurement and Contract Process Integrity and Conflict of Interest.
17. In another case related to no-bid vendor Seyon, LLC, no-bid, blanket purchase order OP 65399 dated July 1, 2024, was issued to Seyon, LLC for a “Temporary Sr. Account Clerk,” categorized as a “unique service” by the City of San Jose's procurement unit.
18. This means that only Seyon, LLC can provide this "unique" accounting staffing resource.
Purchase order OP 65399 for a “Temporary Sr. Account Clerk” from Seyon, LLC appears to have been extended at a cost of $102, 252.80 until June 30, 2025.
19. Are the taxpaying residents of San Jose to believe that only Seyon, LLC, which appears to be operating out of a residence in Sacramento, can provide a "Temporary Sr. Account Clerk" who provides “unique services”? The no-bid award of purchase orders to Seyon, LLC does not appear to meet the standards of the San Jose Municipal Code outlined on Page 10 of the Procurement Audit Report.
20. It would appear that there is a huge dearth of knowledge in extremely basic financial accounting and that only one unique, no-bid vendor, Seyon, LLC, can bridge that gap, at least based on a basic interpretation of the purchase order approval forms of the City of San Jose which .
21. Competitive bidding has been carried out by the City of San Jose's procurement unit for amounts much less than $102,000. San Jose Municipal Code requires that any procurement over $10,000 be carried out via competitive bidding.
22. In order to ensure transparency, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest when it comes to expending City of San Jose taxpayer funds, and to eliminate any negative perception by the public, the City of San Jose would do well to produce a special report on the award of $3 million of taxpayer dollars in no-bid purchase orders to Seyon, LLC, and include details regarding the staffing resources whose services are being billed by Seyon, LLC as "unique services."
23. It would help if the City of San Jose can verify, via actual documents, if the hourly rates specified in the City of San Jose Department of Human Resources logs — hourly rates to be paid to the staffing resources and the vendor markup — were/are being adhered to by vendor Seyon, LLC since the pricing does not appear to have been obtained via competitive bidding.
Source(s): Public Records Act requests fulfilled by the City of San Jose
Thanks
This message is from outside the City email system. Do not open links or attachments from untrusted sources.
From: Mario Rios [ ]
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2025 6:23 PM
To: PSFSScommittee [[email protected]]
CC: District1 [[email protected]]; Fruen, Joseph [[email protected]]; District2 [[email protected]]; Yamamoto, KiyomiH [[email protected]]; District3 [[email protected]]; District4 [[email protected]]; District5 [[email protected]]; District 6 [[email protected]]; District7 [[email protected]]; Kolander, Grace [[email protected]]; District8 [[email protected]]; District9 [[email protected]]; District 10 [[email protected]]; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan [[email protected]]
Subject: Procurement Audit Report – Enlisting the Help of Students From Local High Schools
PUBLIC COMMENTS
Hello,
Please reference Procurement Audit Report, Page 26
Capturing And Reporting Metrics About Cycle Times for Strategic Procurements Would Help Purchasing Assess Performance
“But some dates are missing, and the data is inconsistently entered by staff, making it harder to rely on.”
“These dates are not universally tracked in the current log.” “As such, the log does not allow for tracking timeliness data across key stages of the procurement process such as solicitation development, proposal evaluation, and contract negotiations. This information can inform future training needs and demonstrate when other departments are responsible for delays. For example, during one procurement, Purchasing waited for six months while a department revised the scope of services. This can signal to Purchasing where and how departments may need additional guidance.” Procurement Audit Report, Page 28
“To promote greater transparency and accountability in the strategic procurement process, the Finance Department should implement a project status tracker or workflow system…”
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PUBLIC COMMENTS
Would it be possible for the City of San Jose to enlist the help of students from Cristo Rey San Jose Jesuit High School, Independence High School, San High School, Evergreen Valley High School, Piedmont Hills High School, and Oak Grove High School and assign them projects related to the defining, developing, and deploying of performance metrics since the senior leaders of the Finance Department appear to be struggling to do so? Many of these students can write software code, are digital natives, and they may be able to come up with a low-cost custom workflow solution using open-source workflow engines such as Apache Airflow, Dagster, etc. to capture data and orchestrate workflow events.
The procurement unit appears to have been struggling to understand and execute on the concept of performance metrics as articulated by then-Mayor Liccardo and appears to have been struggling to produce performance metrics since 2019 and October 7, 2021, when then-Director of Finance Ms. Julia Cooper, then-Assistant Director of Finance Ms. Luz Cofresi-Howe, and then-Deputy Director of Finance, Purchasing and Risk Management, Ms. Jennifer Cheng promised then-Mayor Liccardo, on the record, that they would cleanse performance metrics- related data and produce meaningful metrics and cycle times to track the performance of the procurement unit and outcomes in response to Citywide complaints to then-Mayor Liccardo that procurements were taking too long or, in some cases, being cancelled or “abandoned.” The data then-Director of Finance Ms. Julia Cooper was referring to was related to less than 20 requests for proposals, about 50 requests for quotes (RFQs) and requests for bids (RFBs) and all of that data could have been manually analyzed in less than 5 hours, with performance metrics being produced an hour later.
Four years later, the taxpaying residents of San Jose are hearing new variations on the same themes: senior leaders in the Finance Department struggling to define, develop, measure, and deploy performance metrics, published metrics being conveniently categorized by the procurement unit for the City Auditor as “average timeframes and are not tracked as metrics” (Procurement Audit Report, Page 26, Exhibit 6) when it finally turns out that over 90% of requests for proposals (including cancelled RFPs) and, possibly, 80% of RFQs and RFBs breached their respective metrics, inconsistent procurement policies and procedures, fragmented guidelines leading to fragmented responsibilities and, consequently, the extremely fragmented delivery of procurement projects, lack of training, lack of standardized templates, lack of tools or resources to draft scopes of work, inconsistent or incomplete scopes of work, ineffective supervisory reviews, a third of published City of San Jose bids cancelled or abandoned leaving City departments frustrated and worried about the timeliness of procurements, City of San Jose departments waiting for over two and over three years for straightforward, boilerplate-style procurements, etc.
What has not been mentioned here is the “bidding fatigue” when it comes to qualified vendors bidding on City of San Jose bids when the procurement unit cancels bids during the bidding process and, in some cases, re-releases the very same bids for bidding after a few months.
Bidders have to free up their staff to pursue City of San Jose bids and absorb the cost of paying staff as “the cost of doing business” when these bids are cancelled, sometimes as in the case of City of San Jose requests for proposals (RFPs), after several months into the bidding cycle.
It would be a great option to enlist the assistance of students from local high schools.
The students would be able to report on the City of San Jose’s procurement performance metrics and progress in meeting the deadlines contained in the Procurement Audit Report in real time.
The students can also publish their findings and insights and “calls to action” in their respective school newsletters on a monthly basis instead of waiting for a semi-annual update from the procurement unit (Procurement Audit Report, last page, “Progress updates will be provided to the City Auditor’s Office on a semi-annual basis.”)
In this day and age, the taxpaying residents of San Jose deserve to know procurement-related data — including performance metrics and progress updates — in real time and not on a “semi- annual basis.” It would help if the procurement unit can create a real-time dashboard or a balanced scorecard to increase visibility into the procurement cycle and increase transparency, thus leading to the accountability that Mayor Mahan has mentioned countless times.
Thanks,
Source(s): Public Records Act requests fulfilled by the City of San Jose YT video, October 7, 2021 – City of San Jose
Procurement Audit Report – City Auditor
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From: Jim Korngold [ ]
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2025 1:54 AM
To: PSFSScommittee [[email protected]]
CC: The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan [[email protected]]; District1 [[email protected]]; District2 [[email protected]]; District3 [[email protected]]; District4 [[email protected]]; District5 [[email protected]]; District 6 [[email protected]]; District7 [[email protected]]; District8 [[email protected]]; District9 [[email protected]]; District 10 [[email protected]] Subject: Public Comment – Procurement Audit Report
a) This request is for the City of San Jose's procurement department. b) For a start, and in the interest of transparency and accountability, please request the procurement department to provide approximate completion dates (month, year) for each of the following 8 requests for proposals (RFPs) appearing on the City of San Jose's public bidding portal on August 19, 2025. Also, provide a flag (Yes/No) against each request for proposals to show if each of said requests for proposals will meet the 9-month metric or timeline for requests for proposals as stated in Procurement Audit Report, page 26, Exhibit 6, which specifies a timeline of 6-9 months from start to completion.
c) Please provide the start date for each of these requests for proposals (RFPs) as to when each one of them was assigned to procurement staff.
d) The start date will be earlier than each of the respective dates of release for public bidding appearing against each of the 8 requests for proposals mentioned below. e) Some requests for proposals may have already crossed the 9-month timeframe for requests for proposals specified in Procurement Audit Report, page 26, Exhibit 6, which specifies a timeline of 6-9 months from start to completion.
f) For all the 8 requests for proposals appearing below which may have crossed the 9-month timeframe or the single request for proposal which was cancelled, please provide a one-sentence explanation for the delay.
g) Surely, it is not too much to ask for details regarding 8 records. This request will also serve as litmus test for the procurement department in terms of accountability and readiness to meet the deadlines appearing in the memorandum (yellow pages at the end of the document) in the Procurement Audit Report.
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h) Silicon Valley software firms routinely crunch trillions of such records every minute to provide insights and actionable data for the entire world. The data requested for 8 records related to requests for proposals can be compiled manually within 10-15 minutes.
i) The residents of San Jose and then-Mayor Liccardo and then-Councilmember Mahan were promised reliable performance metrics for requests for proposals on October 7, 2021. We are now in August 2025.
j) Providing this data will also align with Mayor Mahan’s data-driven approach to accountability.
Requests for proposals (Source - http://www.biddingo.com/sanjose - City of San Jose - Purchasing)
1. PUR-RFP2025.07.10081 - Encampment Cleanup Services - Released for public bidding on 07/22/2025
2. PUR-RFP2025.06.10072 - Emergency Management AI-Integration Data Modeling Solution - Released for public bidding on 07/03/2025
3. PUR-RFP2025.05.10056 - Electronic Filing System for Form 700, Campaign Finance Forms, and Lobbyist Registration - Released for public bidding on 05/08/2025
4. PUR-RFP2025.01.10020 - AI-Powered Sewer Video Analysis and Defect Coding Solution - Released for public bidding on 04/18/2025
5. PUR-RFP2025.01.10009 - Airport Concessions Maintenance Services - Released for public bidding on 02/04/2025
6. PUR-RFP2025.01.10000 - Debt Management Solution - Released for public bidding on 01/23/2025, cancelled on 06/04/2025
7. PUR-RFP2024.12.10163 - Environmental Data Management System - Released for public bidding on 12/20/2024
8. PUR-RFP2024.12.10161 - Implementation for Salesforce Customer Relationship Management system - Released for public bidding on 12/13/2024
Thank you.
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