Purchasing Process Assignment

For the public purchasing process assignment I followed the lead of a couple of my classmates. I decided to call up Jeff Hurst from the Hillsborough County School Board. Because Hurst has been working in the transportation department of the School Board for the past 10 years, I thought he would be perfect in letting me in on the process of purchasing a school bus.
Hurst said that since he started with the board in 1998, the process for purchasing buses has become a bit more tedious. He mentioned a few reasons why the process takes a little bit longer now then it did when he started. He said that when the process starts out a committee meets to decide on what features they want on the bus. This process takes longer now because there are quite a few more features on buses now then there used to be.
After they decide on what features they want on the buses, there is a bidding process. This is where the state decides how much money to give the county to purchase school buses. If the county does not use all of the money that the state allocates to them, the county gives it back to the state. All of this budget allocation information is open to the public.
Hurst said that there are typically about 1,000 buses per day on the road. He said that the price of the buses has increased dramatically over the past 10-15 years. Hurst stated that now a bus with all the features they want on it (air conditioning, video surveillance, etc…) typically costs over $100,000.
The county will usually buy around 90 buses every year to replace the ones that have been used for 15 years. That is basically how the cycle works. Right now the county has a total of 1,425 buses in its system.