At the end of the most recent legislative session, the Maine Legislature passed LD 857, “An Act to Increase Government Transparency in the Procurement of Goods and Services.” Gov. Janet Mills chose to allow the bill to become law without her signature. 

LD 857 is a win for Maine because it increases government transparency in the state’s procurement process. Maine, like all states, needs to procure goods and services to carry out various government functions. It’s preferable that the state engage in the competitive bidding process to procure services because competitive bidding increases fairness, reduces costs, and protects against favoritism in government contracting. 

Too often, though, Maine has found a way around competitive bidding and instead awards what are known as no-bid contracts to a non-competitive vendor. The public disclosure on these types of contracts has historically been limited. LD 857 requires the Department of Administrative and Financial Services (DAFS) to publish all records of the intent to waive the competitive bidding process to ensure the public has access to this information moving forward.  

Failures revealed in the 2024 Audit Report

It became clear that a change to Maine law was necessary after troublesome findings were revealed in the state’s latest annual audit conducted by state auditor, Matt Dunlap. 

The report highlighted the failures within the Office of Procurement Services (OSPS), which is the entity within the Department of Administrative and Financial Services (DAFS) that handles state contracts. The OSPS repeatedly awarded no-bid contracts without analyzing required costs. 

In the audit, a total of 45 contracts were reviewed by the state auditor, 31 of which were eligible to be awarded without competitive bidding. Of those 31, 16 had no proof that the Bureau of General Services had initiated any investigation for the OSPS to bypass the competitive bidding process.

The OSPS was also found to be overusing Low-Cost Service Contracts (LCSCs) – services that cost less than $5,000 and are not subject to the competitive bidding process. The audit found more than half of the seven LCSCs that they reviewed were awarded to vendors who had been contracted for similar work in the past 12 months. State procurement rules expressly forbid contracts being awarded to vendors in this manner.  

Little of this information was readily available to the public because the state’s transparency rules (or lack thereof) allowed state government to post the contract information online for only a short period of time before it disappeared. Despite this, the limited transparency they did engage in helped to reveal the scope of the problem thanks to dogged journalists at the Maine Wire who’ve reported extensively on the state’s sketchy procurement practices.

Contents of the No-Bid Contracts

Recent investigations by The Maine Wire have revealed several troubling examples of the state’s strange contracting practices, including:

  • $120,000 to left-wing Newspapers: The Maine Trust for Local News (MTLN), a non-profit that owns the Portland Press Herald and other Maine newspapers, was awarded a $120,000 no-bid contract from the Mills administration to publish articles glorifying the Maine Department of Education’s use of federal funding. 
  • Nepotism: William Longfellow, who previously served as the director of Maine’s Bureau of General Services, resigned after the Maine Wire reported Longfellow awarded his brother a $812,776 landscaping contract. 
  • COVID-19 Ads: The Mills administration spent $130,000 in a no-bid contract to the Maine Association of Broadcasters for a public ad-campaign to encourage parents to get their kids vaccinated for COVID-19. 

This is just a small sampling of the questionable contracts that state government has entered into during Gov. Mills’ tenure.

A Path to More Transparency

The revelations contained in the 2024 state audit and investigations into the state’s contracting processes make one thing clear: Maine’s procurement system is broken. It lacks transparency and does not contain sufficient checks and balances to protect taxpayers. 

That’s why Rep. David Boyer sponsored LD 857 this session, which significantly strengthens the existing transparency laws to require the state to preserve and make available on a publicly accessible website all records and documents regarding the procurement process. This includes publishing notices of intent to waive competitive bidding and supporting documents, including question-and-answer summaries, evaluation team packets and award decision letters.

This means Mainers will finally be able to access important information about state contracts that they were not able to access before. LD 857 is the momentum Maine needs to fight against growing bureaucracy and inject transparency directly into state government spending.

Mainers deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent. LD 857 will help them do just that.