Item - 2020.GL15.23

The General Government and Licensing Committee received the report (August 27, 2020) from the Chief Procurement Officer for information.

The purpose of this report is to discuss the merits of using the Ontario Good Roads Authority, Road Authority web portal online catalogue (the TRA Web Portal) for pre-vetted products needed for all infrastructure projects. 

The TRA Web Portal is designed to consolidate information about products, services and technical solutions and acts as a product catalogue for various materials and products used in various road construction. While products may be approved and in the TRA Web Portal, there is no significant or rigorous testing by any unbiased group, therefore there is no assurance that products are more preferable, i.e. of higher quality or safety standards and/or priced competitively to other products which do not appear on the list, simply put the portal does not contain all available products from all vendors, or all vendors' products or contain prices of the products that are on the website.

Municipalities may, at their discretion, chose to use the Road Authority web portal to provide a list of pre-qualified items that, as part of either their procurement process or part of their contract, can direct bidders to consult the list when they are preparing their bid submission or in how they approach the work under a contract.

Staff's view is that the City should not use the TRA Web Portal, as the sole process for qualifying products in the TRA Web Portal is not rigorous, the City does not have an extensive prequalified list of products and there is additional costs for vendors to use the TRA Web Portal.  Staff will continue to review the TRA Web Portal as a resource in case it can be of assistance to the City with respect to products in future construction procurements.