Nate Monroe: 4,000 pages later, Jacksonville jail's $110 million no-bid contract a mystery

COMMENTARY | Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said over the summer his agency conducted a “deep dive” into NaphCare — the private firm that took over health-care services in the Duval County jail after public scrutiny over inmate deaths — but more than 4,000 pages of department records released to the Times-Union last week show no such due diligence by Sheriff's Office officials was ever conducted.

The documents, provided the day before Thanksgiving in response to a records request originally filed nearly four months months ago, shed little light on the origins of the $110 million, no-bid contract Waters provided NaphCare, nor do they show whether JSO officials explored the firm’s history or vetted other potential providers.

Waters said during a news conference in late July he’d turned to NaphCare after a recommendation from his counterpart in Hillsborough County, but the documents JSO provided, which were supposed to be an exhaustive accounting of all the records related to the NaphCare procurement, reflect no written communications with law enforcement officials there or anywhere else across the state.

Instead, the documents only show that a conversation with NaphCare began in April after a senior vice president emailed JSO’s programs and transitions chief, Warren Calloway.

“Attached you will find our proposal,” the NaphCare executive wrote. “We look forward to discussing this further following your review.”

The public scrutiny over inmate treatment began in earnest earlier this year after The Tributary, a local news nonprofit, found that jail deaths had tripled since the agency ended its in-house program in late 2017 and handed over the responsibility for inmate health care to Armor Correctional Health Services, a private firm.

This year, that trend has continued. Waters attributed his decision over the summer to nix JSO’s contract with Armor to “a bunch of different reasons,” never explicitly acknowledging the questionable quality of inmate care.

Although NaphCare, like Armor, has a track record of inmate care worthy of scrutiny — including a controversy over the death of an inmate in the Fulton County, Ga. jail who was described as having been “eaten alive” by bedbugs — Waters appeared totally unfazed over the summer. And the records do not show that JSO officials conducted any background on the company.

“You can look at any medical facility in North Florida, throughout the state of Florida. They all have issues,” Waters said. “They’ve all had lawsuits. They’ve all had those things.”

After his late July news conference announcing that Armor would be replaced with NaphCare, the Times-Union and the Tributary filed separate but similar records requests to learn more about the no-bid contract and its provenance. In the end, although JSO’s response to those document requests differed wildly — despite the fact that they should have covered the same ground — neither proved fruitful.

The 4,000 pages of records JSO provided the Times-Union after months of delay — and demanding nearly $450 in fees — is comprised primarily of several dozen emails repeated over and over, and slightly different versions of the NaphCare contract as attorneys haggled over its precise language. None of it is particularly revealing; in response to the Tributary’s request for similar documents, JSO, inexplicably, only sent over a copy of the NaphCare contract.

The metadata on the file JSO provided the Times-Union show it was last modified in mid-October, a likely indication the department sat on the request, which was filed in late July, for about a month before turning it over the day before Thanksgiving. The law requires public agencies to make documents available within a “reasonable time.”

It’s unclear why JSO needed several months and hundreds of dollars to produce the request. Although 4,000 pages sounds hefty, in reality the overall file is incredibly redundant. To wit: I sent the file over to my friend Andrew Pantazi, the founder of the Tributary, who ran a program designed to filter out all the pages that are substantially similar. That alone whittled the 4,000-plus pages into just 681, and that still included several draft versions of the NaphCare contract, which is about 100 pages itself.

Waters has repeatedly underscored his commitment to transparency — he reaffirmed this pledge when announcing the NaphCare agreement over the summer — but he has done little to reverse JSO’s gradual slide into opacity, a trend overseen by his predecessors.

Among the local press, JSO is notorious for its excessive public-records fees and its tendency to slow-walk, over-redact and under-provide.

The NaphCare documents were no more complex or sensitive than the kinds of records my colleagues and I have requested and received from other public agencies, including City Hall, for years, and those documents are often free of charge and provided far sooner than four months. But JSO claimed it would take about 14 hours for an employee to “review” the NaphCare records for potential redactions, generating a fee of about $350 (it also charged about $100 just to search for the records, another cost other public agencies don’t often levy).

As was clear from the outset, and as the records themselves ultimately demonstrated, there was virtually nothing that should have required extensive review or redaction in these records. Unlike some documents housed within JSO, like investigative reports, these were simply records about a government procurement — the kinds of records other agencies will sometimes proactively provide. JSO’s months-long “review” only resulted in the redaction of a few cellphone numbers (and even that was likely overzealous: the law says agencies can redact personal cell numbers, not those used for official business, which was the case in the NaphCare records).

There is nothing sacrosanct about the way JSO chooses to interpret the state’s broad public-records law.

This week, for example, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the identities of police who shoot citizens can’t be shielded under Marsy’s Law, a victims’ bill of rights that Florida voters enshrined in the state constitution several years ago. JSO was among the many departments across Florida that immediately adopted an expansive — and questionable — view that this new law allowed departments to withhold the names of officers they deem to have been victims in interactions with private citizens. JSO sometimes went even further than its peers: in the aftermath of the new law, the agency began reporting crimes as having occurred at “record exempt” to “record exempt” — essentially blacking out such basic information it was impossible to tell where crimes were actually happening in the city.

The Jacksonville City Council recently formed a special committee tasked with studying conditions at the Duval County jail and weighing long-term solutions. The council’s finance committee has also recently taken up the thorny question of no-bid contracts, demanding greater transparency on them from Mayor Donna Deegan’s administration.

Yet somehow the NaphCare contract — perhaps the most important component of the jail’s condition, and at $110 million, far and away the largest no-bid contract on the city’s books — hasn’t seemed to generate much interest among council members.

In the four months it took JSO to provide the Times-Union the requested NaphCare records, five more people died at the jail, for a yearly total of 14 — the fourth consecutive year of double-digit deaths reported by the facility.

Council members have made no effort to push the sheriff to justify why it was necessary to hand out such a lucrative no-bid contract when there are many potential providers of inmate health care — including JSO itself, which oversaw fewer annual deaths on average.

This is a decision upon which tens of millions in public dollars are at play, and in which the lives of actual people— often, those who have not been convicted of any crime and are simply awaiting trial— hang in the balance.

Their silence is inexcusable.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Sheriff's Office records lack clarity over selection of health care provider