Buffalo Grove mulls hiring purchasing agent

In some way, local governments are just like the people they serve.

Buffalo Grove wants to tighten its belt on household expenses like computers and office supplies. With that in mind, trustees are discussing hiring basically a “czar” for central purchasing.

The idea was discussed this week at the village board’s committee of the whole.

Leisa Niemotka, assistant to the village manager, said a centralized purchasing agent would provide a service that the village currently cannot: writing contracts, working with experts on specs and striking hard bargains on purchases.

“Similar to what millions of Americans are doing, we were looking very carefully through the village for ways that we can basically save money,” Niemotka said, “by doing more with less.”

As she described the position, about three-quarters of the person’s time would involve purchasing management. This person would also do some work for the finance department.

Trustees asked the village staff to come back with more information and pressed Niemotka and Village Manager Dane Bragg to make some actual projections on cost savings. Both admitted it would be difficult to pin down an exact figure.

Trustee Jeffrey Berman expressed some doubts over the proposal, first floated in July.

“We’re still in a position where you’re asking us to take on a cost, hiring a person to do this job, but you’re not really able to at least give us a sense for whether even the savings would pay for the cost of that person,” Berman said.

Bragg said it would be difficult to predict the savings for the first year.

Over several years, though, Buffalo Grove would see considerable savings “by consolidating a lot of contracts, reducing the number of vendors that we have into a smaller group and having longer-term relationships with those vendors,” Bragg said.

“I think that will benefit us and we will eventually recover that cost.”

Bragg said economic realities have forced the village to change its internal culture and “think about how we purchase products and supplies.” “We probably haven’t really done a lot with it because we didn’t need to,” he added.