Bills on vending contracts introduced Hampden businessman’s complaints inspire changes to make bidding fair

AUGUSTA – Reacting to complaints from a Bangor vending company, an Etna lawmaker has introduced two bills to correct perceived inequities in the state’s competitive bidding process.

The two bills, assigned Tuesday to legislative standing committees, were sponsored by Sen. Betty Lou Mitchell, R-Etna. The measures were crafted to remedy problems encountered by Hampden businessman Lloyd Willey in his ongoing challenge to the Maine Division of the Blind and the Visually Impaired.

Last November, the seven-member Advisory Committee on Competition with Private Enterprise unanimously concluded that the blind agency’s efforts to control vending services in a building where no visually impaired employee or manager was on the premises was inconsistent with the intent of a 1995 law authorizing the activity.

“The contracting of vending services by MDBVI, where no blind person is involved, is merely a revenue-generating system,” wrote Richard Thompson, director of the state Division of Purchases and a member of the committee. “It appears that these revenues subsidize other food service operations and some of the MDBVI staff.”

The inequity of the law was brought to the panel’s attention by Willey, who operates Canteen Service, a vending company in Bangor. Willey lost a major contract he had held with the University of Maine for 25 years after the division took over the vending franchise on campus and awarded the business to another bidder in 2000.

He appealed the contract’s award on a number of grounds, but the one that resonated with the advisory committee focused on specific language in the law that justified why the Division of the Blind and Visually Impaired should be given a vending franchise over the private sector in the first place.

According to the law, the division could place vending machines in a public building as long as the proceeds provided blind or visually impaired people “with remunerative employment, enlarged the economic opportunities of blind persons and encouraged blind persons to become self-supporting.”

Mitchell said Tuesday that LD 1286, assigned to the Legislature’s Labor Committee, would rewrite the section of law Willey challenged and make it conform to the language recommended by the Advisory Committee on Competition with Private Enterprise. Her second bill, LD 1285, assigned to the State and Local Government Committee, would require that before a state agency can provide goods or services to the public, those goods or services would have to be reviewed and approved by the advisory committee.

Both measures, she said, would go a long way to correct the inequities Willey had experienced and to prevent future recurrences of unfair competition.

“The advisory committee made an excellent decision in support of Canteen Services,” Mitchell said. “This was a blatant example of unfair competition by a state agency against the private sector.” The committee found that the nearly $200,000 a year the division collected in vending profits was benefiting, at that time, only seven visually impaired people working in state buildings and that none was working at the University of Maine.

In its ruling, the advisory committee said the division’s interpretation of the law “interrupts the normal business activities of competitors such as Canteen.”

“The Committee recommends that [the law] be evaluated and recommends eliminating MDBVI’s exclusive right to operate vending services in public buildings where operation by a blind person is not warranted,” Thompson wrote. “This will dramatically reduce revenues for the program. MDBVI would be required to compete for funding based on the merits of its program.”

The Maine Division of the Blind and Visually Impaired is an agency within the Bureau of Rehabilitative Services which is overseen by the state Department of Labor. Harold “Bud” Lewis, executive director at the MDBVI, said Tuesday his office will review the legislation, which he said appeared to contradict the 1995 law that gave the agency its unique advantage.

“That was the charge they gave us in 1995 and now they’re saying not to,” Lewis said. “We’ll be happy to do whatever the Legislature asks us to do.”

Willey said he was delighted with the swift progress of the legislation, submitted only four months after the advisory committee’s decision. Public hearings on both bills should be scheduled within the next three weeks. Gov. John E. Baldacci, a longtime friend and former Bangor City Council seatmate of Willey’s, said he was “sympathetic” to the legislation’s intent. Still, the governor said he would “have to study” the bills before determining whether he would lend them his support.

Mitchell, the lead sponsor for both measures, was joined by co-sponsors: Sen. Mary Cathcart, D-Orono; Sen. John L. Martin, D-Eagle Lake; Sen. Carolyn Gilman, R-Westbrook; Sen. Tom Sawyer, R-Bangor; Sen. Karl Turner, R-Cumberland; Sen. Edward Youngblood, R-Brewer; Rep. Joshua Tardy, R-Newport and Rep. Mary Ellen Ledwin, R-Holden.