Procurement Services puts contracts in place that delivers city services. This metric tells us that suppliers are competing to do business with the City to deliver services and may be a proxy for a healthy and inclusive economy. Suppliers competing to deliver city services allows Procurement Services and other city employees to negotiate for lower prices, improved quality, and better services, bringing more value to Portlanders.

This affects Portlanders’ day-to-day because all Portlanders rely on services from the contracts that Procurement Services puts into place.

This metric is tied to the Procurement Strategic Plan.

30%of the City’s competitive solicitations receive only one proposal, and the City awards the contract to the one supplier that submitted.  The City's 30% is better compared to procurements at the federal level“During fiscal year 2015, 44% of the U.S. government’s procurement budget was paid to contracts drawing only one bid,” (Kang and Miller 2021).

Why did the percentage of competitive solicitations that received only one proposal drop trend downward? This is a strategic procurement question. Public procurement performance metrics generally track operational functions such as whether procurements completed according to proper procurement authority, rules, regulations, and laws. In addition to public procurement’s operational functions, public procurement may also work strategically, using the City’s vast purchasing power to meet strategic goals to grow the economy, share opportunities inclusively, develop the City’s workforce, and decrease poverty. Additionally, resources for centralized training, standardized procurement processes, and support from city leadership are needed to ensure that Procurement Services can carry out its strategic functions. However, the city’s budget limits Procurement’s financial resources, including the number of employees, year-over-year, resulting in lower-than-optimal operational service levels and less capacity to implement strategic functions or to answer strategic procurement questions definitively.

Portland’s recent efforts to increase outreach and to grow the capacity of suppliers to do business with the City provides some promising hints to why the city received more proposals. The Community Opportunities and Enhancement Program and the Strategic Procurement initiative represent those efforts for example. Achieving a more competitive environment means that more Portlanders can benefit from lower prices, improved quality, and better services. Yet more data gathering and analysis is required to understand whether and why the city is achieving a more competitive environment for public contracting. 

The data source comes from our procurement platform BuySpeed, which is a portal where Procurement Services advertises competitive solicitations and suppliers register and submit proposals.

The metric filters out all incomplete and non-competitive procurements, competitive procurements that award multiple contracts, and those with data quality issues that can’t be easily corrected such as incorrect values for contract numbers.

The metric is calculated by dividing the number of competitive solicitations with only one bidder that resulted in a contract by the total number of competitive solicitations with one or more bidders.

Currently there is no data dictionary or files for reproducing the analysis. However, the Strategic Procurement initiative in Procurement Services will be sharing normalized data, which will be mapped to the Open Contracting Data Standard. The publication of policy and data dashboards for commonly requested procurement and contracting data will accompany the OCDS publication in February 2025.

The OCDS data publication, the publication policy for the OCDS publication, and accompanying data dashboards built using the OCDS dataset publication will be available in April 2025.