AUGUSTA — The LePage administration plans to use a more traditional “request for proposals” process to invite vendors to bid on Maine’s wholesale liquor contract, the state’s administrative and financial services commissioner said Wednesday.

Commissioner Sawin Millett was responding to concerns raised by Sen. Roger Katz, R-Augusta, who recently wrote to Millett to say he was “uneasy” with the process the state was planning to use to solicit bids for the state’s liquor contract, which the state’s Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations plans to either renegotiate or terminate in the coming months.

Millett and Gerry Reid, director of the state’s Bureau of Alcohol Beverages and Lottery Operations, told lawmakers earlier this month that the state plans first to bargain competitively with interested and qualified parties. If that process fails, Reid told members of the Appropriations Committee that the state would resort to the more traditional request-for-proposals system.

In a letter sent to Katz on Wednesday, Millett said his department held internal discussions about how to invite bids and settled last week on a traditional process in which the state will publish a request for proposals that includes a detailed, written description of what it’s seeking and outline the criteria against which the state plans to score the bids it receives.

“We have carefully considered which options — RFP or bargaining — would provide the fairest and most transparent process for securing a new liquor contract while maximizing the return to the Maine taxpayers,” Millett wrote. “A decision was reached internally last week that the RFP approach would provide the most objectivity and fairness, with a clearly delineated appeals process defined by statute and rule.”

In his letter to Millett last week, Katz said there were too many unanswered questions about what he called a “negotiated bid process.”

“To what extent is proprietary information of the bidders shared with the others by the [state official negotiating the contract]? Is there any kind of a scoring system in this process similar to the RFP process? What are the appeal rights following such a negotiated bid process?” he wrote. “These are the kinds of questions others and I have been asking, yet no one seems to have clear answers.”

Maine is one of a handful of states that controls the distribution of hard liquor. In 2004, the state leased its wholesale liquor business for 10 years to Maine Beverage Co. in exchange for a $125 million upfront payment and an annual cut of the sales revenue.

The contract on that lease comes due in 2014, and the current state budget requires the state to renegotiate the liquor contract by June 2013 in order to secure revenue for transportation and drinking water programs as well as state reserves.