County suspends its bidding process

Los Angeles County supervisors voted Tuesday to suspend the process used to evaluate many of the county’s competitive contract bids and ordered a stop to a decades-old practice of shredding documents created during such reviews.

The unanimous decision came a week after the board fought over how the bids for a multimillion-dollar-a-year welfare-to-work contract were scored, ultimately rejecting county staff’s recommendation to switch contractors.

Expressing concern that the county review was unfair to the current contract holder, Virginia-based Maximus Inc., supervisors last week voted 3 to 1 to begin the bidding process anew rather than go with the review committee’s preferred choice, Denver-based Policy Studies Inc.

Maximus spent more than $200,000 on lobbyists in the first nine months of this year, waging one of the most expensive lobbying efforts in recent years in an effort to keep the contract serving some 11,000 Antelope and San Fernando Valley residents each month. Policy Studies Inc. spent $25,000 during the same period.

Under the motion approved Tuesday, supervisors suspended the use of consensus-only scoring on competitive bids. In that process, workers individually evaluated bids before meeting as a group and filling out a single score sheet reflecting their consensus. The individual scores were then shredded.

William T Fujioka, the county’s chief executive, must return within two months with a “new, consistent and uniformly applied contracting policy,” the supervisors said.

It is not clear how many contracts will be affected by the board’s decision, which is used by different departments to different degrees. Supervisors ordered Fujioka to report back next week about how many contracts were awarded under the consensus-review system before Nov. 21 and what type of services they covered.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky raised concerns about consensus scoring after county staff recommending a switch to Policy Studies Inc. from Maximus. He said Tuesday his concerns had “nothing to do with the outcome. It has to do with the process. And this process needs to be fixed.”

Maximus has held the contract for 13 years with little competition, lobbying supervisors for support while its work has repeatedly been criticized. It will now hold the contract at least until the new bidding process is completed. The rejected bid review cost an estimated $250,000 and took a year, county staffers said.

On Tuesday, as he did a week ago, Yaroslavsky decried consensus scoring and arbitrary shredding that he said left department heads unable to justify their recommendations on the welfare-to-work contract to the board.

“This is not a Maximus-versus-PSI issue. This is about every contract we have in the future having a transparent process,” Yaroslavsky said. He said he was not influenced by Maximus lobbying.

But Supervisor Gloria Molina, who voted against rebidding the contract last week, said other supervisors, and in particular Yaroslavsky, have fallen under Maximus’ sway.

She noted that Maximus did not take issue with consensus scoring when it was used to award the company its last two county contracts and is only disputing it now because “it’s the only thing they have to hang their hat on.”

“They never had any issue about consensus scoring until someone else was awarded the contract,” Molina said.

“It speaks mightily about what the lobbying dollar will bring here.”

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molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com