[media-credit name=’MATTHEW KUTZ/Herald photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle announced a plan Monday that will save state taxpayers more than $80 million through a new strategy that consolidates bidding contracts. Another goal of the plan is strengthening local businesses owned by minorities and women by encouraging their involvement in the bidding process.

The plan is part of Doyle's Accountability, Consolidation and Efficiency initiative. As a whole, the initiative will save the state $200 million over the next four years by "standardizing human resources staffing levels, improving state facility management and strengthening the state's information technology infrastructure."

"With this simple, common-sense idea, we've changed the way the state government does business and we're already saving taxpayers' money," Doyle said. "We signed new procurement contracts for seven categories of goods and services that will save taxpayers more than $16 million a year, a total of $80 million over the lifetime of these contracts."

Doyle said the new bidding contract policy would save the state 33 percent on office supplies, 27 percent on printers, 20 percent on janitorial supplies and 10 percent on software. The discounted prices will be the result of a statewide competitive bidding process that allows the government to purchase goods in bulk, rather than leaving each individual agency to procure goods on its own.

"These savings are just a few of the examples of how we are providing our state agencies and universities with lower costs on the goods and services they need to operate, without sacrificing quality," Doyle said.

The program also benefits local and tribal governments, Doyle added, who also will be able to purchase goods from the new contracts.

"This gives these governments a new way to control their own costs without sacrificing quality and is another way the state is reaching out to help local governments," he said.

Not only will the bidding contracts save the state money, they will also encourage small business growth, Doyle added.

"Through ACE we've made significant progress to increase small minority-and women-owned businesses' share of state contracts by requiring large vendors to have subcontracts with these firms," he said.

According to Scott Larrivee, a public information specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Administration, the state will cut 35 procurement positions and 47 information technology positions as a result of using the new contracts.

"The ACE initiative is about streamlining and improving government, so that it saves taxpayer dollars while improving the levels of service the government can deliver," Larrivee said.

In the '90s, he said, state government did not keep in step with changes that occurred elsewhere.

"Over time there was a lot of government waste that built up and when the boom time of the '90s went away, state taxpayers were left holding the bill," Larrivee said.

In addition, under the ACE initiative, Larrivee said, every dollar saved by the state through the bidding contracts can be spent on education and property tax relief.

"It's the win-win situation where we not only operate better, we can better serve people," Larrivee said. "And we are also saving them money."