The importance of building relationships: 2022 Exemplary Public Servant Molly McLoughlin

Molly McLoughlin

Public service is a calling, and people who enter it feel strongly about serving. Procurement, on the other hand, is not necessarily a field one is called to, but the right person can use procurement skills to benefit their community. That is the case of Molly McLoughlin, former director of facilities for the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) in Colorado, who has been selected as one of American City & County’s 2022 Exemplary Public Servants.

McLoughlin has the calling to public service. “I am in public service because that’s who I am by nature, she says. “My parents are public servants and that’s just who I am as a person.” Procurement was more something that found her, when she started out in parks and rec, and while doing that, she went back to school to get her masters in organizational management. “I climbed the parks and rec ladder and became superintendent of parks and open space,” she says. “In that work, I ended up managing a lot of contracts and wrote scope-of-work for RFP’s and bids and ended up doing the procurement process.”

After a brief stint in the private sector, McLoughlin felt the call to return to public service. “I applied for the job at Boulder Valley School District being a senior buyer, because when I looked at the job qualifications it was everything I had been doing in all of my previous roles packaged in one neat little package,” she says.

She was hired in August 2011, and rose through the ranks from senior buyer to procurement manager, director of supply chain and finally director of facilities, where she oversaw 57 schools over 500 square miles in 11 different communities in the whole BVSD. That adds up to 4.8 million square feet of facilities and more than 770 acres of grounds. “I had operations of 70 full-time and part-time maintenance staff and then 164 custodial staff,” she says. “Anything that had to do with facilities—indoor air quality, environmental issues, electrical, plumbing, grounds, drywall, infrastructure, roofs—fell under my preview. That included not only goods and services but capital projects.”

One of the projects McLoughlin worked on really put the BVSD ahead of the pack. In 2014, the board of directors for the district wanted to identify and establish a baseline of where the district buildings were at with indoor air quality as they were doing a huge retrofit and improvement of HVAC equipment. “I was on the forefront of that,” McLoughlin says. “Pre-COVID, we had already started all this work on measuring carbon dioxide making sure that we had the appropriate filters, and making sure we had adequate ventilation in all our spaces. We didn’t know that we were setting ourselves up to be prepared for a pandemic.”

So while BVSD was ahead of the curve when COVID hit, there were still challenges and the unknown factors that popped up every day, especially as schools were reopening, and it was vital to make sure all facilities were safe and supplied. “I was in a unique situation because I had all of these amazing vendor relationships I had established when I was the director of supply chain management doing procurement,” McLoughlin says. “So, I could reach out, having all the established vendor relationships and call all vendors directly, knowing that we had contracts already in place or national cooperative contracts in place and say ‘hey this is what we need. Do you have a product available that we know you can validate is safe you have quantities available, and can we get it right away, ahead of everybody else ordering?’”

Because of those strong relationships with vendors, BVSD was able to get what they needed, including hand sanitizer and cleaning products, in a matter of days, and have those products available throughout the pandemic. “I have to say that it was all because it was all based on relationships,” McLoughlin says. “It’s really about the value of relationships that you build throughout your career that creates those opportunities.”

McLoughlin keeps building those relationships through NIGP (National Institute of Governmental Purchasing), where she has been a member of the governing board for almost six years, and as a volunteer in RMGPA (Rocky Mountain Governmental Purchasing Association), where she serves as the communications chair. With both organizations, she helps to promote the public procurement profession. “Being a public procurement professional means that we live by our values and guiding principles, and then we also promote the profession, and we encourage others to volunteer and advocate for public procurement…. I mentor people every single day, whether it’s in my organization or RMGPA or NIGP. I love to teach people even in other chapters.”

As mentioned, procurement isn’t a profession that has an actual calling, but it can be rewarding. The challenge is getting the younger generation interested in the value of public procurement in the face of more lucrative private sector careers. “You don’t come into public procurement because you’re going to get rich. You come into public procurement because you’re here to serve the public,” McLoughlin says. “I’ve worked in the private sector for about a year and that was not a fit for me. The public sector is a fit for me because my whole being is about giving back to others, and I think that’s why my volunteerism with NIGP and RMGPA matters to me, because I get so much more by giving to those organizations and teaching others and giving back to these communities then I could ever put in a dollar amount or monetary amount.”

McLoughlin left her position with BVSD in November 2022 to join the Colorado Department of Transportation as their director of procurement, where she will oversee the purchasing and contracts and services department for the entire state, and will buy all the goods and personal services for the department, excluding construction. She oversees a 24 people in two different groups—a purchasing team and a contract team.

She has hit the ground running and is looking forward to building her team and working on a new purchasing procedural directive, all to better serve the people of Colorado. “Being a public servant is in my being,” she says. “I think that we all have an opportunity to give back, and it’s just in my blood.”