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Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert publicly warned VR Systems would reject a voter registration contract with the county before commissioners scheduled a vote on the matter on Tuesday because it is "no longer executable."
VR Systems is the county's voter registration vendor.
Calvert said commissioners directed the Bexar County District Attorney's Office this past September to negotiate a contract with the company using the same contracts other counties of similar size use. But Calvert said there was a "sharp departure" from that direction.
Proposed changes to the contract language did indeed get rejected in person by the company's chief operating officer, Ben Martin, who reviewed a copy of the contract before speaking to commissioners.
"It's likely based on the changes going in the other direction that our counsel would advise us not to move forward," he told commissioners who later took the matter into executive session and emerged without taking action.
Martin told commissioners his company handles voter registration for 15 Texas counties, which make up 25% of all registered voters in Texas. And he brought to commissioners, for their review, examples of contracts successfully executed with four of them: Collin, Denton, El Paso, and Tarrant Counties.
While Martin did not get into too many specific objections with the contract, Calvert did in a news release before the commissioner's meeting.
The commissioner said the contract is not executable because it mischaracterizes the product being purchased and it holds VR Systems responsible for data handling, security, incidents, backups, and operational failures that depend entirely on county employees, county infrastructure, and county policies — in effect asking the vendor to assume legal responsibility for how the county runs its own computers.
Calvert also said it strays far from a BuyBoard contract submitted in July and would allow the county to keep VR Systems intellectual property beyond the contract.
BuyBoard is a cooperative that allows governments to piggyback off of existing contracts and price terms, according to Calvert.
He also said the contract before commissioners on Tuesday was rewritten without vendor review or approval,
"The most direct and reliable path forward remains returning to the BuyBoard cooperative contract the State has already vetted and that other counties are using successfully," he said.
Calvert said he believes a contract with VR Systems will come before commissioners again in February.
