Four Agencies Scored the Software. None of Them Scored the Exit.

Year four. The department has decided to move. You email the vendor asking for a full export of eleven years of registration history, waivers attached, household relationships intact. The reply quotes an hourly rate and a 90 day queue.

Nobody scored for this. That is not a guess. Five real recreation software RFPs were pulled and read end to end, and the pattern in what they measure is the same one that produces that email.

The rubrics disagree with each other completely

Joplin, Missouri weights cost at 30 percent. Corte Madera, California scores team, understanding, scope, project management, and references, and gives cost no weight at all. Redmond, Washington splits the difference at 15 percent and weights the capabilities of the system itself at 30.

Four agencies buying the same category of product, and the price of it counts for anywhere from a third of the decision to none of it. Read the three rubrics side by side and one more thing shows up. Not one of them names contract terms, data ownership, or exit conditions as a scored category. The committee evaluates the product and the team. The clause that decides whether you can ever leave gets handled after the award, by whoever reads the paper last.

These agencies proved the clauses are askable

The same documents show how much an RFP can actually demand when it chooses to. Rock Island, Illinois requires PCI Level 1, no stored card numbers, 99.95 percent uptime, role based access control, and encryption at rest and in transit. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board requires annual PCI service provider certification, the attestation on request, audit rights for the life of the contract, and written notice of any breach.

Those are demanding terms, written by public agencies, accepted by bidders. The exit terms are no harder to write. They just were not written.

Three exit clauses, in the same voice

Rock Island itemizes its pricing sheet into annual subscription, implementation and training, and data migration as separate lines. That is the model. Migration is priced as a deliverable on the way in. Price it on the way out too.

• A named export format with relationships intact. Households, registrations, payment history, and waivers linked, not four flat files. Specify the format and the number of days after termination it is delivered in.
• A fixed extraction price, set now. Ask in plain words what it will cost to hand back your own data at the end. Professional services at then current rates is not an answer. This is the cheapest clause to fix before signature and the most expensive one to find after.
• A cap on renewal increases across the full term. Year one is a marketing number. Tie years two through five to CPI or a stated percentage, or the five year total you showed council is a number nobody can stand behind.

Put them where they get scored

Every clause above is a line in an evaluation rubric, not a footnote for legal. Corte Madera can weight project management at 15 percent. Any agency can weight contract and exit terms at 10 and make bidders answer in the proposal, on the record, before there is a winner to negotiate against. Public finance guidance from the GFOA is blunt about the timing: the negotiating room you have before signature does not come back.

If you want the five year picture for the system you are running today, including what leaving it would cost, our free cost-recovery audit lays it out.