Nate Monroe: Jacksonville City Council, mayor, sheriff all botch no-bid contracts

COMMENTARY | The Jacksonville City Council's finance committee on Tuesday scrutinized a $300,000 no-bid contract for lobbying and grant-writing services that Mayor Donna Deegan's administration provided a firm that had also hosted an event for Deegan's mayoral campaign, a decision that was, most charitably, imprudent. Left mostly unacknowledged Tuesday was an exquisite irony: Some of the most vocal council critics either supported or benefited from non-competitive grants slipped into the city budget at the last minute — similarly imprudent payouts that required dipping into city reserves to fully cover.

All of this makes the city look ridiculous.

The council was frustrated at the public scolding it received this fall for signing off on non-competitive grants for its own colleagues and, in one case, for a charter school founded by a prolific Republican campaign donor, so it leapt at the chance to tarnish Deegan, the city's new Democratic mayor, with the same sin. City Council President Ron Salem actually verbalized some of this tension.

"My point is, if we're gonna get that kind of scrutiny, then I think scrutiny on the executive branch should be the same way," he said Tuesday. "I'm not going to take that criticism without looking at the other side"

So let's start here: Everyone screwed up.

In September, the council awarded a $300,000 grant to the Clara White Mission, a nonprofit run by council member Ju'Coby Pittman, who also sits on the finance committee. It also provided a $90,000 grant to a group affiliated with The Fire Watch, a nonprofit run by the finance committee's chair, Nick Howland. Both grants were awarded without any kind of competitive process even though nearly every other nonprofit in the city must compete for taxpayer money. The council also agreed to place these grants on a fast-track approval process, another consideration not afforded to most city nonprofits, which must follow a lengthy and extensive competitive application process.

There were no substantive reasons offered for why this fast-track was necessary, or, in the case of Clara White — a nonprofit that has weathered significant scrutiny in recent years — why the money was necessary or a wise investment in the first place. The council was aware of reasons to at least raise questions about both grants but opted to approve their inclusion in the budget with a kind of code-of-silence that has become characteristic around this unsavory annual practice.

Deegan didn't veto those grants. She also signed the budget without nixing an additional $1.4 million to help build a gym for Jacksonville Classical Academy, a charter school that is part of a network of conservative institutions trying to reshape public education in America. Financing school improvements is not typical for City Hall, and at least one decades-old opinion from the city's Office of General Counsel said such expenses are not permitted. Like the nonprofit grants, there were other good reasons for council members to hesitate signing off on this money, but they did regardless.

Jacksonville Classical Academy was founded by John Rood, a prolific Republican donor who has helped finance multiple council campaigns, including those of several council members who approved the money for the school's gym.

And, it turns out, Deegan awarded a non-competitive contract of her own: The city awarded a $300,000 one-year contract to Langton Consulting for lobbying and grant-writing services without first seeking proposals from any other firms. This kind of non-competitive award, called a "sole-source" contract, is supposed to be limited to some specific circumstances. Although the Deegan administration offered a few justifications for sole-sourcing this particular contract, none of them were terribly persuasive. It was, at best, debatable whether this contract met the criteria necessary to trigger a sole-source award, and the city ought to be simply erring on the side of offering multiple firms the chance to bid.

That dilemma was amplified by the fact that Langton Consulting's president was a material supporter of Deegan's mayoral campaign.

The terms of art differ some, but all these awards, by the council and the mayor, are essentially of a piece: no-bid contracts.

They are also eclipsed by a far larger no-bid contract issued earlier this year. In July, following controversy surrounding the death of an inmate who'd recently received a heart transplant, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters booted the jail's old health-care provider and awarded a sole-source contract worth up to $110 million to a new firm, NaphCare.

NaphCare, like the jail's former provider, Armor, has a controversial track record of inmate treatment, and Waters did little to explain why it was necessary to make such a significant decision without soliciting proposals from more than one firm.

Council members complained Tuesday that Deegan's sole-sourced contract lacked the transparency of their own no-bid awards (this isn't quite right: the city has a procurement committee that meets in public just as the council does to sign off on contract awards). But the circumstances surrounding the jail contract remain secret: The Times-Union still hasn't received procurement records related to NaphCare that it requested back in July and has paid hundreds of dollars in fees to obtain. The city, for its faults, generally makes procurement records available and relatively easy to obtain.

And it's not as if the jail is an obscure after-thought. The council currently has a special committee taking a look at the possibility of building a new jail. Health care should be a critical component of this group's work, but there has been no public concern aired about Waters' decision to sole-source the jail's health-care contract.

This fall, yet another high-profile office found itself mired in procurement controversy. Although a review by the city's Office of Inspector General found no violations of city rules or procurement laws, it criticized the chief resilience officer, Anne Coglianese, for failing to avoid the appearance of favoritism when awarding contracts to Louisiana firms that employed her former co-workers (these contracts were awarded under the previous mayor). In one of the office's "areas of concern," the inspector general said Coglianese attempted to sign off on a sole-source contract, but that request was ultimately denied. The firm she'd hoped to provide the contract to won the award anyway.

The city's competitive procurement rules exist to keep public officials out of trouble. Every now and then they might even lead to better outcomes and better returns on investment for taxpayers.

Why is this so difficult?

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: Nate Monroe: No-bid contracts stain Jax council, mayor and sheriff