Firm courts supervisors, wins reprieve

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.

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.”

For much of the time Maximus has done work for the county, the company faced no competition. The decision Tuesday cleared the way for Maximus to extend the $32-million, three-year contract for at least six months and probably longer while the lengthy bidding process gets underway for a second time. PSI executives said Tuesday that they will bow out.

“We had the highest technical score and the lowest price, yet we lost,” company Vice President Doug Howard said. “I don’t know whether we want to go through this again or not. It’s been very frustrating.”

Yaroslavsky said Department of Public Social Services staffers improperly favored PSI. “I’m bothered by the way the bureaucracy has campaigned for this company,” he said in comments directed to the department’s head, Philip L. Browning, and his deputies. “I want to just say that lobbyists move over because you guys have done a great job in spinning this as best you can.”

Yaroslavsky accused the department of releasing statistics that unfairly painted Maximus as providing poor service during a study period last year. The department’s assessment showed the company failed in five of eight categories.

Yaroslavsky -- citing papers that had Maximus’ logo on them -- said better statistics showed the company succeeded in a majority of benchmarks, including the rate of employment. His office later acknowledged the statistics he mentioned in his public remarks were compiled by Maximus’ team of lobbyists.

His spokesman, Joel Bellman, defended the use of the document, saying the performance measures it used were chosen by Yaroslavsky and his colleagues, and county sources were used for the statistics.

Maximus reported payments to lobbyists of more than $200,000 during the first nine months of the year. Englander & Associates, one of the largest lobbying firms involved in county politics, was among those hired. Knabe’s son, Matt, is a partner; the firm’s founder, Harvey Englander, is one of Knabe’s former political consultants.

PSI reported $25,000 in lobbying expenses for the same period.

Burke chided her colleagues for paying attention to the questions raised by Maximus and not those by PSI.

Molina, on the other hand, flatly rebuked the decision. “We’re going in the wrong direction and all because of the lobbyists involved,” she said. “The worst part about it is that we will replay this next time if the outcome is not desired by the majority no matter what the score is. If it is the same, the war continues, and I think that’s the shameful act here.”

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garrett.therolf@latimes.com