Under heavy lobbying, L.A. County supervisors agree to rebid welfare contract
Saying a critical review of Maximus Inc. was flawed, county orders a new study. In the meantime, Maximus will extend contract while low bidder Public Studies Inc. will bow out.
Los Angeles County supervisors on Tuesday disregarded a strong recommendation to award a multimillion-dollar welfare-to-work contract to a new firm, instead ordering the bidding process to begin anew, giving a reprieve to a poorly rated company that spent $200,000 lobbying the county this year alone.
The 3-1 vote to throw out the results of a yearlong review -- which required thousands of hours of staff time at an estimated cost of a quarter of a million dollars -- came after Virginia-based Maximus Inc. lodged one of the costliest lobbying efforts at the county in recent years.
Maximus, which has held the contract for 13 years with little competition until now, has been paid tens of millions of dollars. At the same time, its work has repeatedly been criticized as inadequate.
Welfare contract: An article in Wednesday's California section about two companies that had sought a welfare-to-work contract with Los Angeles County incorrectly gave the name of one of them, Policy Studies Inc., as Public Studies Inc. In addition, the article said officials of the firm had decided to bow out of the second bidding process for the contract; it should have said they might bow out.
Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Zev Yaroslavsky backed rebidding the contract instead of awarding it to Denver-based Public Studies Inc. They represent the Antelope and San Fernando valleys, where Maximus serves 11,000 people each month. Supervisor Don Knabe voted with them.
Supervisor Gloria Molina, however, called the decision "shameful" and voted against it. Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke, who is retiring, abstained.
Antonovich, Yaroslavsky and Knabe argued that they had no choice given what they described as a flawed review by Department of Public Social Services staffers. The supervisors said they believed staffers improperly shredded some of their notes which might have revealed bias.
In addition, they said that a county audit of the review which found no such bias was flawed because some of the auditor-controller's staff were involved in the initial bid evaluation process. [Two additional reviews of the recommendation to change vendors also found it valid.]
County staffers said the shredding of initial notes is a practice in place since the 1980s in what is called "consensus scoring." All bid evaluators agree collectively on a recommendation in the process, which is listed as a "best practice" in county handbooks, and the destruction of initial notes is designed to limit the county's exposure to litigation.
In his motion to rebid the contract, Antonovich expressly prohibited the method and Yaroslavsky in an interview after the vote called it "Nixonian."
