UCI Medical Center Coffee Cart to Be Bid

Officials at UCI Medical Center have dropped a plan to hire a multibillion-dollar company to take over Kelly Jeffrey’s small gourmet coffee concession and instead have decided to seek competitive bids.

The medical center’s about-face comes after Jeffrey complained to the university’s affirmative action office that replacing her Divi Espresso coffee stand with a Marriott International Inc. unit would violate a state mandate to promote businesses operated by women, minorities and the disabled.

Medical center officials said Monday that the decision to ask for bids was not influenced by her complaint, but was an effort to assure Jeffrey that she was not being treated unjustly.

Jeffrey also has asked the university’s internal audit office to look into the circumstances of her pending ouster. She contends she was told in January that the contract would be renewed June 30.

“I just feel totally sick,” said the 32-year-old entrepreneur, who quit a management job with Marriott International Inc.’s hotel division to buy the coffee business two years ago. Her husband quit his hotel management job and joined her in the business two months before Jeffrey was told by medical center administrators that her contract would not be renewed.

Jeffrey, Marriott and several other vendors will be bidding on the new contract, center officials said.

She is raising her charges of impropriety as medical center officials are struggling to cope with an avalanche of criticism centering on alleged improper activities at the world-renowned fertility clinic there.

Jeffrey said that the same day she was told her contract would end, Marriott Health Care Services, which runs the cafeteria at the medical center in Orange, circulated a flyer announcing that it would be starting a coffee cart when Divi Espresso left.

“To me, that looks like Marriott is trying to put me out of business,” said Jeffrey--who wrote an impassioned letter to Marriott Chairman J. W. Marriott Jr. in late April asking why the huge company was after her contract.

On May 11, Marriott wrote back that he had “been informed that UCI Medical Center made the decision not to renew your contract. . . . Therefore, the issue is between you and the university and does not involve Marriott.” He signed the letter, “Best personal regards.”

Allyson Brown, the medical center’s former associate director of general services, said in a recent interview, however, that Marriott officials have long been interested in the coffee concession. She said she was asked almost three years ago by Marriott’s cafeteria manager whether the giant hospitality corporation could bid on the contract. Marriott officials could not be reached for comment.

Medical center officials said Monday that they had wanted to give the contract to Marriott because “it is far simpler to consolidate all food services under a single vendor.”

Jeffrey says a center official told her, however, that Marriott saw her as competition.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey is continuing to lobby for her business. Among other things, she has given center officials copies of petitions of support signed by more than 900 medical center employees. And she is filling out the 11-page bid form.

“I’ll submit a bid,” she said, “but I don’t have a lot of confidence. The same people that kicked me out in the first place are the same people who will be making the decision.”