# Tashika Keown **Lead Buyer, Pulaski County Purchasing Department.** Email `[email protected]`. Phone 501 (340) 8311 (or 8390 depending on context). Fax 501 (340) 8352. Office: **201 S Broadway, Ste 440, Little Rock AR 72201**. The "Tashika Keoww" rendering in the corpus is the email-signature variant Keown uses; the legal-name spelling is "Tashika Keown" per the Pulaski County Purchasing letterhead. For the surveillance investigation, Keown is the **County-side primary counterparty** on the [[Flock Safety, Inc.|Flock]] procurement: she ran [[Pulaski County RFP-23-003 Solicitation and Flock Safety Bid|RFP-23-003]] from solicitation through award, drafted the [[Pulaski County Flock Safety Term Contract Award (Contract 6764)|August 7, 2023 Award Letter]] for Judge Hyde's signature, and conducted the [[Pulaski County Flock Safety MSA and Order Form (Contract 6764)|October 2023 MSA negotiation]] with Flock's [[Philip Nanni]]. ## Role and affiliations - **Lead Buyer** at the [[Pulaski County Purchasing Department]] - Located in the Pulaski County Government central administrative office complex - Primary County-side procurement contact for vendor RFPs and contracting ## Appearances in the corpus ### RFP-23-003 issuance (April 2023) - Named **Buyer** and **Event Contact** on the RFP-23-003 solicitation (Issue Date 4/2/2023, Deadline 5/2/2023 2:00 PM CT). Bid responses were submitted to her via ARBid. ### RFP-23-003 evaluation (June 2023) - Authored the **June 29, 2023 Notice of Proposals Received** memorandum to Chief Deputy [[Earnest Whitten]] (PCSO), reporting bid receipt and evaluation completion and asking Whitten to make the award selection. ### Contract Award (August 2023) - Drafted the **August 7, 2023 Term Contract Award Letter** for [[Barry Hyde|Judge Hyde]]'s signature, formally awarding the contract to Flock Safety on the basis of the bid-evaluation outcome. ### Sales-rep transition (August 1, 2023) - Direct phone-call counterparty in [[Philip Nanni]]'s August 1, 2023 takeover from [[Tom Dull]] as Flock's Pulaski County account manager. Nanni's email: *"Thank you for your time on the phone this morning, and for letting me know this process is getting wrapped up shortly."* ### October 2023 MSA negotiation - **The primary County-side negotiator on the executed MSA red-line.** Across 3 weeks (October 3-25, 2023), Keown corresponded with Flock's Philip Nanni iteratively reviewing and modifying the standard Flock MSA terms. Key positions: - **October 3, 2023 7:14 AM:** Flagged that Flock's hyperlinked Terms and Conditions could not be printed to PDF. Insisted on receiving the T&Cs in PDF form. - **October 3, 2023 11:16 AM:** Asserted the **"ARBid terms control over the MSA"** procurement-law theory: *"when a vendor submits a bid through ARBid, they agree to the terms and conditions set forth in the bid… the agreement cannot supersede the terms and conditions listed in the bid."* - **October 4, 2023 10:45 AM:** Sent red-line edits across MSA pages 12, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, and 30 — i.e., 9 substantive pages of the standard Flock contract. - **October 20, 2023:** Clarified MSA § 11.4 (Entire Agreement clause). - **October 23-24, 2023:** Worked through MSA § 9.3 with Flock; ultimately approved. - **October 25, 2023:** Received Flock's clean copy for signature. ## Notes - **Keown's contracting posture is the most arms-length the corpus documents at an Arkansas Flock procurement.** Unlike Conway PD's procurement (where Mayor's-Office Procurement Manager [[Tiffany Maddox]] facilitated Flock's signing-before-Council pattern and instructed the drafter to remove "sole source" language) or LRPD's procurement (where the contract was a cooperative-purchasing piggyback with the Senior Deputy City Attorney's review framed as a "business decision"), Keown took a multi-week red-line negotiation through both the substantive contract terms and the underlying procurement-law theory. *Observation, distinct from the record:* Pulaski County Purchasing Department's Lead Buyer role may have institutional culture and incentives different from those of municipal-procurement-manager roles at smaller Arkansas jurisdictions; Keown's arms-length posture is consistent with that of a larger county's professional procurement-officer corps. - Keown is the only Pulaski County Purchasing Department staff member surfaced by name in the corpus. The corpus does not document her tenure, prior employment, professional certifications (CPM, NIGP-CPP, etc.), or substantive trajectory beyond the Flock procurement. - The "Tashika Keoww" email-signature spelling (visible in Keown's outgoing messages in the negotiation thread) is consistent across multiple emails — i.e., it's not a one-off OCR or typo. The corpus does not explain the signature variant. - Keown's "ARBid terms control" theory is the corpus's clearest articulation of a county-procurement-office's contract-law position. Whether the position has been litigated, has been formally validated by Arkansas legal authorities, or is the consensus position of Arkansas procurement-officers is not in the corpus.