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Cooperative contracts, the good, bad, and the ugly. At the Government Finance Officers Association conference, which was June 30th, I participated with Elena Hofnagel, Dean Mealy, and Elizabeth Mealy in a discussion about cooperative contracting in front of three, four hundred CFOs, and it was a great and lively session. So here's a recap. So of course, cooperative contracting is when multiple entities participate in a single sourcing event or join a program that collects and makes these contracting vehicles available in the future to eligible entities. These cooperative contracts are a key part of the public procurement landscape. Delltech reports that $61 billion was spent on co-op contracts in 2025, and ELG estimates that 20% of local spend now flows through cooperative agreements. Why? Well, there's a clear value proposition for public procurement shops, pooling the buying power, slashing the procurement time, and letting staff focus on strategic priorities that can't be met by the co-op contracts. And yet cooperative contracts bring trade-offs. Large standardized deal structure doesn't always align with a jurisdiction's unique needs, and agencies relinquish some control over approach and contract terms, things like length, specifications, renewal options, wind piggybacking. And while co-op contracts generally meet public procurement laws, they can often require additional verification and may not cover every aspect of use, meeting federal funding requirements, for example. Critics also warn that statewide or national contracts can edge out small or local businesses and cause concern from elected leaders who want procurement dollars circulating in their communities. So given that, here were the main topics that we covered in our brisk hour panel. Number one, efficiency versus customization. So co-ops do deliver undeniable time savings, but we need to retain our procurement skills to research and test for improvement opportunities through negotiation and modification. Ensuring compliance and best value. A recurring theme was the importance of internal checklists and approval workflows. Even though co-ops are competitively bid, procurement and oversight roles should maintain best value analyses and audit trails to satisfy both policy and public stewardship expectations. Three, supporting local and small business. While economies of scale favor large contracting events, the panelists underscored strategies to balance speed and scale with other goals, such as negotiating for local use options or targeting the co-ops for specific needs and not unnecessarily broadening them to the point that it's inhibiting competition. The fourth was embedding co-op use in a larger strategy. Rather than treating co-op use as an all-or-nothing choice, agencies and NCs can evaluate each major spend category and determine where co-ops fit in a broader sourcing portfolio and target the co-op's use in the areas where it is solving the maximum value and making time available for those sourcing and procurement activities that co-op contracts can't address. Then, fifth, measuring impact. We talked about recommending both dollar savings and process efficiencies by monitoring the total spend going through co-ops and comparing how the use of these vehicles stands up to other forms of solicitation and sourcing. So I did record the session, but unfortunately the audio was garbled because of the room setup and the way the microphones were. So rather than try to give a direct replay, I instead went through and pulled three quotes from each of the panelists that I thought gave you a glimpse into the discussion. So from Elizabeth Milway, first, we recommend and use a cooperative purchasing checklist to ensure any potential contract truly meets our needs and expectations. Second, co-ops won't always be the least expensive option, but they do generate efficiencies, time, resources, or both that must be factored into our decisions. And third, tracking co-op usage as a percent of our spend is a best practice for maximizing value. So Dean Mealy contributed when procurement is involved early in the budgeting process, we can analyze co-op options that inform both budget and timeline planning. Second, we encourage staff to actively shop, comparing multiple co-op contract agreements to find the best fits. Targeted training helps teams understand where these tools add value. Sometimes it's time, sometimes it's money, sometimes it's a combo of both. Elena's three quotes: you can't spend maximum time and effort on every purchase going out the door. So that's why co-ops free up capacity for more complex sourcing events. Second, there's a risk to alienate local vendors by going too heavy in co-op contracts. So research if there's a strong local pool that supports the category in question, and that's an important consideration. And third, if your RFP process is so broken that co-op contracts become your only option, that's your cue to fix the RFP process itself. And for me, you have the ability to shop co-ops through a bake-off, quote unquote, which is a small form competition among vendors, and request particulars that meet your specifications and terms. Second, the use of co-op contracts is not binary, on or off, but rather it fits well in a category management approach. For each major category, are co-ops a good fit? And then co-op contracts are a tool in the toolkit. It's not the only tool. You use it when it's the right fit. So this was a great panel, lots of good interactions, lots of questions from the audience, a lot of thinking on the feet. So we really enjoyed it. Thanks to GFOA and Mike Mucha for the venue and for the opportunity. And I think it was a valuable and engaging session.