County expands regional child-abuse reporting
To enhance the prosecution of abusers and prevent future child abuse, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a motion by Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich to expand cross-reporting to nine additional cities -- Burbank, Hawthorne, Santa Monica, Torrance, Hermosa Beach, Inglewood, Long Beach, Pasadena and Redondo Beach.
The Board of Supervisors have been taking many positive steps recently. From cracking down on child abuse to getting serious about the budget, I'm expecting great developments from them. I’ll be keeping an eye on them in the coming weeks. Recently, they reissued an RFP for vendor services to operate the county’s GAIN case management services (a welfare-to-work program). I expect the same two companies will submit proposals as last year – Maximus Inc. and Policy Studies Inc. (PSI).
ReplyDeleteMaximus has maintained its contract with the county for many years now, but its cost to the taxpayers keeps skyrocketing. If the new bids resemble those from last year, we can expect that the Maximus bid will cost taxpayers almost a million dollars more than PSI’s.
What’s more, Maximus has a track record of poor performance. Under its latest three year contract, Maximus has been cited repeatedly for failing to meet required goals in 5 of 8 categories (according to the LA Times). Last year, the Department of Public Social Services favored PSI based on scoring done on the two companies by a neutral third party. PSI scored 9,082 out of 9,616 possible points in the procurement process, whereas Maximus scored 7,824 of 9,616. PSI won by a 13% margin on technical score and also submitted the lowest bid, which was 6% cheaper.
Even worse, Maximus has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to buy the support of the Board of Supervisors through lobbying and campaign donations.
I, for one, am grateful that the BOS reissued the RFP and am confident they will select the right choice for LA. In these tough economic times, we need our local elected officials to scrutinize how every tax dollar is being spent and eliminate waste wherever possible. I hope we see a changing of the guard here very soon.