County staff to conduct procurement policy training

Thurston County management plans to conduct training for employees working on procurement and contracts to refresh them on the county’s procurement policy, county staff told the Board of County Commissioners on Wednesday, August 23.

Procurement and Contract Manager Rebecca Kirby told the board that she would be meeting with stakeholders to discuss the training needs, prepare training presentations, and receive feedback from the stakeholders before finalizing their training material.

Department offices would then have to designate staff along with project managers to attend these trainings, which Kirby’s office would facilitate. Kirby said she would coordinate with the IT office so they could incorporate its procurement policy.

Count management also plans to update the procurement policy in 2024.

Assistant County Manager Robin Campbell suggested to the board that they could mandate the training for employees working on procurement, especially with the county adopting an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to streamline the procurement process. Campbell added that they could require an internal audit of purchasing practices across the county.

Commissioner Carolina Meija suggested that they should also consider penalizing department offices that bypass the procurement policy so that the board would not need to revise the county’s budget to correct or adjust to improperly procured items.

Kirby added that they plan to create a SharePoint site as a resource page for the procurement policy, as well as to help staff submit new procurement requests and acquire the most updated templates so that staff is using the same forms with terms and conditions that have already been vetted by the county’s legal team.

Procurement of body cams bypassed IT procurement policy

Meija requested the meeting so that county staff could refresh them on their policy after several instances where department offices procured products and services that bypassed the IT’s procurement policy.

“I think that we have seen a lot of offices and departments recently, like within the last year, going out and purchasing things without checking in first,” Campbell said. “I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to not being aware of our policies. “

One example mentioned during the meeting was the procurement of body cams in 2022 by the Sheriff’s Office, which bypassed the IT procurement policy. Meija said that the procurement had an impact on the iCloud database of the prosecutor and public defense offices, which the sheriff’s office did not anticipate.

IT Director Sherrie Olg explained that when she had learned about the procurement, she asked the Sheriff’s Office why IT was not involved and was told by the Sheriff’s Office that they thought they didn’t need IT support.

Olg said that there are times when IT vendors would convince buyers that their products or services do not require the involvement of IT personnel, which Olg said is never really the case.