Form 470's Posted, Now What?
~ Only 23 days until the 471 deadline!~
Message Posted January 24, 2006
After the Form 470 is posted, there is a mandatory 28 day (minimum) waiting period during which vendors may submit proposals to you for consideration and/or contact you for more information relating to the services you listed on your Form 470. During this time, you are not permitted to do anything relating to vendor selection or contract signing. Then, on the 29th day after you posted your 470 (or after), you can do the three S's:
* Select a vendor,
* Sign contracts (if appropriate), and
* Submit your 471.
I will be sending 3 different e-mails, each dealing with one of these S topics.
Bidding, Bid Evaluation and Selection of Vendors
If contacted by a vendor about a service listed on a 470, applicants are required to provide relevant information to prospective vendors so they may submit solid proposals for your consideration. Applicants should not simply ignore these inquiries as it would be a violation of the E-rate competitive bidding requirements and applicants are encourage to keep a log of all vendor inquiries and your responses to these inquiries.
1) What if a vendor contacts you but it is not in response to your 470?
One big problem with the 470 is that it provides a publicly available marketing list of school and library applicants. One way to know if the inquiry is legitimate is to ask them for the 470# they are referring to, and the specific service on that 470.
2) What should we do if we only received one bid, or not bids, for a service listed on our 470?
In such instances, the SLD advises that applicants write a memo to their files explaining why they selected that particular vendor. For example:
* At the conclusion of the Form 470 28-day waiting period, we only received one bid, which was from [fill in name of Vendor]. We reviewed the bid for cost effectiveness and selected [fill in name of Vendor] as the provider for [fill in description of service].
OR
* At the conclusion of the Form 470 28-day waiting period, we did not receive any bids. [Fill in name of Vendor] can provide [fill in description of service] service to our entity and is cost effective. Therefore, we selected [fill in name of Vendor] to provide our entity with these services.
3) Do we have to select the lowest bid?
No, but you are required to select the lowest responsible bid after you have completed a bid evaluation process. The SLD has been asking more and more applicants to provide all of the bid responses received as a result of your Form 470 competitive bid, as well as your bid evaluation process in order to prove that you selected the lowest responsible bidder. Keep in mind that price of eligible services has to be the most heavily weighted factor, which means that if you have 3 criteria that you judged the proposals on, price of eligible services must be at least 34% of the total weight.
A sample bid evaluation worksheet will be posted in the next day to the PA E-rate website at http://www.e-ratepa.org/helpful_docs.htm under the Form 470 column.
In addition to selecting the lowest responsible bidder, E-rate rules require you to certify that the winning bid is the most cost-effective means for meeting your entity’s educational needs and technology plan goals. Please keep this in mind if you are considering selecting a service that has excessive costs.
4) Is there anything we can do during this 28 day waiting period?
Yes! You are permitted to reach out to vendors and encourage them to submit proposals in response to your 470 posting. And you are encouraged to actually begin your Form 471 online by completing Blocks 1 - 4. Then when you select your vendors, you can complete Block 5 and 6 (but this way, half the work is already done on your form). Don't forget to save your 471 number and security code when you exit the incomplete application so you can return and finish it. Also, I encourage everyone to use the "Create Form 471" option instead of the Interview version of the form. There seem to be fewer bugs.
As always, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me. Next message? Signing Contracts.
Julie Tritt Schell
jtschell@comcast.net
(717) 730.7133 (voice)
(717) 730.9060 (fax)
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