After annexing a large swath of land and roughly 2,000 new residents, the City of Chehalis must redraw its city council districts ahead of the May 2027 candidate registration deadline for next year's local elections.
City council members, however, are concerned they might be overpaying for redistricting services.
The Chehalis City Council voted unanimously against approving a contract in the amount of $57,550 with FLO Analytics for redistricting services during its Monday night meeting. The council hopes to offer a competing company a chance to show their qualifications and price before coming to a final decision.
The council has been deliberating over the choice of contractor to aid in redistricting efforts for more than a month after first considering a contract of more than $90,000 with the same company during its Aug. 24 meeting. While city staff were able to negotiate the price down over the weeks since the initial proposal, councilors are still concerned the price is too high.
“Quite frankly, the number that they came back with kind of surprised us as well,” Chehalis City Manager Stacy Denham said during the August meeting.
Most of the councilors have appeared apprehensive of the price, and Councilors John Six and Kevin Carns have led the opposition to the contract, with the latter often citing his own experience as a political contractor and work on past Washington state redistricting efforts.
Discussing the initial proposal, Carns said the price tag for statewide redistricting appeared to be comparable to the local proposal despite Chehalis having a population of less than 10,000 people.
“This seems high to me,” Carns said. “I’m probably going to be a no on this one just for that fact, having gone through his process twice. And, again, I’ll beat a dead horse, but we can solve this by just going (to) all at-large districts.”
Carns has also been a constant advocate of forgoing districts and making all seven Chehalis councilors at-large, which means they would be determined by votes of the entire city rather than geographic districts. The city currently has four district-based council positions and three at-large positions.
The latest and cheaper proposal from FLO Analytics offered a slimmed down scope of work with fewer services provided by FLO Analytics and presumably a heavier workload on city staff. Council members inquired whether that would in fact be cheaper when factoring in the cost of staff hours.
As Councilor Bob Spahr asked, “is it worth it?"
City staff said they simply couldn’t be sure at the time with current staff having never gone through a redistricting process before.
“The answer is, we don’t know,” Denham said. “Because we don’t know what it’s going to take.”
Mayor Pro Tempore Kate McDougall also questioned if the council should consider potential liability if staff are needed to conduct work they have never done before.
The reduced work is expected to deliver two or three possible district layouts based on criteria approved by the city. The proposed $57,000 contract also comes with add-on work such as a proposal for at-large districts like those Carns has advocated for.
That point caused frustration for many, including Carns, who pointed out that a proposal that did not require districts should theoretically require less work.
“That makes no sense,” Carns said. “It's the absolute simplest, cleanest way to do it. You can wave a magic wand and do it right now with no analysis. I work for one of the largest data companies in America in politics, and this contract is not making a whole lot of sense to me at this point.”
The entire contract negotiation process has been complicated by different bidding rules surrounding the redistricting process compared with other matters, such as construction contracts. For other contracts, the city is able to use price as a qualification and is often legally obligated to select the cheapest qualified bid. For redistricting, the city is barred from using price as a qualification and rather is supposed to select a consultant based on other qualifications, such as experience.
For that reason, the city was not able to ask for the price from multiple consultants at the start of the process and select the most affordable option.
Denying the proposed contract from FLO Analytics will now allow the city to enter into negotiations with a second business that submitted qualifications for the contract. The council hopes the second company will offer a price point they are more willing to stomach and, if not, they left the door open to coming back to the negotiating table with FLO.
“We're now just evaluating the risk in denying this and moving on to the second option and negotiating with them,” Six said. “So there is a risk there that, you know, we end up in a different situation, but it could be a better situation.”
