Bad Krozinger municipal council awards the concession to bnNetze / Complicated procedure for a period of 20 years.
. Concessions for the network operation of a municipality are in great demand and often lead to lengthy legal disputes among applicants. In Bad Krozingen, a new permit for the operation of the city gas network had to be granted. For 20 years. The concession was unanimously awarded by the local council to the Badenova subsidiary bnNetze, which had proven to be the most suitable bidder in a complicated and very detailed procedure.
Since the procedure for the award poses high legal hurdles, the city had the award procedure accompanied by the Freiburg lawyer Dieter Gersemann, who specializes in such tenders and their evaluation. Gersemann explained the procedure and the results to the committee. The current contract with Badenova AG & Co. KG ends on December 31, 2021. The selection process announced in the 2019 Federal Gazette was carried out in the course of 2020, said Gersemann.
This was preceded by a two-hour discussion of the selection criteria in a closed meeting of the municipal council. Non-public because it is required by law that the bidders’ operating and business secrets must be preserved in such tendering procedures.
This was also the reason why it was unclear in Gersemann’s remarks on Monday who was the second bidder in the procedure. In all the charts that were shown, only bnNetze appeared as the winner of the process, the second bidder – there was nothing more – remained nameless.
When introducing the item on the agenda, CFO Christian Thomann once again made it clear that it was not about the delivery of gas, but only about the operation of the gas network. Another, independent question is who is buying what type of gas through this network.
From attorney Gersemann’s remarks it became clear that the second bidder is so far not an original network operator in the gas business, but would use a subcontractor. But this is not a disadvantage. The two bidders each submitted extensive documents, which in the case of bnNetze comprised around 250 pages and in the case of the second bidder around 185 pages. On the basis of the evaluation matrix, Gersemann finally got a score of 930.5 out of 1000 possible points for bnNetze, while the second bidder got 670 points, so that the proposal for the award was unambiguous.
In the case of the price worthiness point, which was heavily weighted in the matrix, the second bidder allegedly offered cheaper, Gersemann explained details, but the information was “incomprehensible”, which is why bnNetze was in the lead on this point too.
Deputy Mayor Josef Heckle, who headed this item on the agenda because Mayor Kieber was biased as a member of the Badenova advisory board, regretted that the local council had practically no room for maneuver in the award due to legal requirements and was unable to make a political assessment. Lawyer Gersemann confirmed that it was about federal laws that had to be implemented at the local level.
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