General News
28 August, 2020
Cassowary Coast Council continues to shop locally
The Cassowary Coast economy is set to benefit from seven new Council contracts worth $5.63M which were recently awarded to local businesses. Demonstrating Council’s commitment to supporting local, Council works and service contracts awarded since July 2019 have returned $39.8M to the local economy.
At last week’s Council meeting, Cassowary Coast Regional Council Mayor, Mark Nolan was pleased to receive an updated report detailing awarded contracts for the Restoration of Essential Public Assets (REPA) Road Repairs program.
“We are fortunate to have strong capability throughout our region and we do everything in our power to ensure that tenders are divided into achievable portions to leverage local business uptake,” said Mayor Nolan.
“The repair works presented a great opportunity to funnel joint Australian and Queensland government funds into the region through local procurement, and we were able to achieve provision of contractual arrangements to local companies including CCUS, Cheshire and IMEC which ensure that the works can be delivered by this coming wet season.”
“The distribution of work between the different companies also provides for reduced risk as all of the projects have deadlines which if exceeded, would expose Council to significant financial risk.”
The road repairs program is jointly funded by the Australian and Queensland governments under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA).
Mayor Nolan also took the opportunity to remind the community of the definition of local business which does not exclude the entity from also having a presence elsewhere.
“Each of these businesses have an established office in the Cassowary Coast, own property in the region and employ locals living in the region which ensures we are retaining as much of these funds within our local economy as we can based on available capability.”
Local content is categorised on an evaluation score out of ten, where the full ten points are awarded to a supplier with head office in the region, through to an overseas-based supplier who would receive zero points. A supplier with a branch office in the region is the next preferred option based on their demonstration of employing local and contributing to the region’s economy through property acquisition.
Significant works awarded by Council since July 2019 are funded under the joint Australian and Queensland government’s DRFA Restoration of Essential Public Assets (REPA) Road Repairs program worth $10.2M to repair roads damaged in an early 2019 monsoon trough.* Of this scope, 100 percent of the contracts were awarded to local businesses with an evaluation score of at least six out of ten.
Under Council’s Procurement Policy, a local price preference weighting of 10% is offered to local businesses to ensure that competitive pricing offers local businesses a further advantage over competitors with no local content.
* REPA Road Repair contracts were delivered in two rounds; Round One tendered November 2019 ($4.58M) and Round Two August 2020 ($5.63M)
