In what has become a mantra of the freeholder caucus sessions, members of the Hudson County Board of Freeholders struggled once more to get a grip on spending in contracts issued to their various professionals, and to get forewarned when professionals breech the spending limits.
Freeholder Bill O’Dea, who has become the leading spokesperson for the movement to control contract overspending, asked during the Jan. 23 caucus if the board could set up an internal auditing group, a department inside county government that could give freeholders an objective evaluation of the job various professionals are doing.
In making his request, O’Dea said the county has millions of dollars invested in contracts covering nearly every aspect of county government from legal fees to food for prisoners, and he would feel more comfortable knowing that the county had “an objective” opinion on the job performance of each.
“What I’m afraid of is that contracts will get automatically renewed without anyone looking to see if we still need those services,” O’Dea said.
Freeholder Al Cifelli, however, said that while he liked the idea of having a review board, he feared such an agency, modeled after the federal government’s General Accounting Office, might become a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Cifelli cautioned the freeholders to weight such a move very carefully to see if the county would save enough money to warrant establishing a permanent department.
“We would have to save enough in contract review to satisfy its existence,” Cifelli said, noting that the county is under tighter budget constraints than the federal government.
County Administrator Abe Antun said the county had examined a possible contract-monitoring department a few years ago and determined that five people would be needed to make such a department work, each of them skilled in auditing.
“These are very desirable types [of people] in business,” Antun said. “We felt then that the county couldn’t provide the salaries needed to lure that kind of people.”
Antun said the county then considered hiring an independent auditing firm, a consultant to check on consultant contracts. “In the past, we’ve hired such firms to look at specific projects or contracts,” he said. But the county never pushed to make the move to hire the firm for steady work.
Bill Northgrave, counsel for the County Executive’s office, said the county isn’t blind to these contracts, noting that his office does its own audit of each bill submitted, checking with someone in the department to make certain the charges are correct. Freeholder Sal Vega, while not opposed to hiring someone on a contingency basis – a group or firm that the county could bring in at need – he feared setting up an internal structure and funding it only to later learn it would not be needed much. O’Dea suggested the freeholders set up a pilot program that would look at a few of the larger contracts.
“From these we could tell if we would save enough to justify setting up something more permanent,” O’Dea said. Freeholder William Braker, however, said the freeholders already have a mechanism for reviewing these contracts. “I thought this is what our contracts committee was set up to do,” he said.
Antun agreed, asking that the committee meet with him to look at upcoming contract renewals.
New way to award contracts
In a related matter, O’Dea questioned the change of county’s bidding process that would allow contracts to be awarded using criteria other than lowest price.
Under a newly approved state program called Competitive Contracting, awarding a contract would be based on a firm’s ability to handle the technical aspects of the contract, management experience, cost, assurance of performance and the vendors financial strength and stability.
The state altered the contracts bidding law based on a 1994 study that suggested certain areas could be changed in order to produce better performance. Being the low bidder, state officials said, doesn’t always guarantee quality.
One area proposed by the state would be food for prisoners, and the county has proposed adopting this method for awarding its food-vending contract for the jail.
O’Dea, however, claimed state law adopted Competitive Contracting in order to allow areas of government that don’t normally get bid on to have a responsible bidding process.
“But here we are taking something that we’ve bid in the past and making it less competitive,” he said.
Northgrave disputed this, saying that state law specifically made food vending for jails one of the areas. The new process would not prevent anyone from submitting a bid, Northgrave said; it would simply allow the county to use additional criteria for gauging the reliability of the vendor.
O’Dea also noted that the specification for the jail food contract was for five years, not the previous three.
Northgrave said the contract could run for up to five years, and he resisted changing the language to require a three-year contract. He said he would ask bidders to submit pricing at three, four and five years to see if there is a bid difference.
Antun said the county wanted the five-year contract in order to get a lower price. Vega, however, said he was uncomfortable with awarding a bid that lasted longer than freeholders’ terms of office.