In the meantime, Hershey's has announced it will work with Rainforest Alliance, Fair Trade USA, and UTZ, along with "other well-established certifications" to raise the ethical standards of its sourcing contracts.
The new system will rely on a "self-releasing boot," developed by the company PayLock, which secured a sole-source contract with the city last year.
Richard F. Averill, research director of 3M Health Information Systems, said the sole-source contract was justified and denied that his company had a conflict of interest.
Under the deal that Mr. McCain helped scuttle, the Air Force would have leased tankers from Boeing under a sole source contract.
And we were banned from hiring Iraqis on our own because we were told that one American contractor had a "sole source contract" with the Pentagon.
But Councilwoman Eva S. Moskowitz, the chairwoman of the City Council Education Committee, questioned whether a single-source contract for computing services was the best way to meet the school system's needs.
Isn't it ironic that an administration that preaches the virtues of competition and the free-enterprise system would allow the Pentagon to sign a "sole source contract" with a provider of translators, thereby eliminating a competitor?
In July 2005, the Bush administration awarded a "sole source contract" to 3M, to analyze whether it was feasible for Medicare to use a payment system modeled on the 3M product.
Supervalu Inc., a food distribution and supermarket company based in Eden Prairie, Minn., said yesterday that it had dropped out of the bidding for a $3.7 billion single-source contract with the Kmart Corporation because it would have to reduce profit margins to unacceptable levels to win the contract.
While no formal agreement on the swap of development parcels has been reached with that developer, the Mills Corporation of Arlington, Va., Mr. Stern said that he found this "sole source contract" for a valuable development tract to be "the most egregious part" of the development plan.
