Forbes magazine
written by Richard Miniter
Friday February 17, 2012
Bureaucratic blundering also frustrated another Supervisor, Mike Antonovich. His staffer, Anna Pembedjian, said he was “very unhappy about the way the first RFP was handled.”
Yet no one was fired. The County Counsel, Andrea Ordin, retired, but that may have been unrelated to the legal contracting mess that was described by nearly every participant as a “fiasco.”
Thayer — the $4 million man — had his fingerprints all over the illegal RFP. He remains at his post. As for DeltaWrx (once known as Thayer Consulting)? It secured a $1.69 million contract renewal to continue its work on L.A.-RICS in May 2011. Despite repeated calls to his Woodland Hills corporate offices and emails to his L.A.-RICS email address, Thayer refused all requests for an interview.
Instead, Pat Mallon—who had wowed county officials by successfully forming a joint-crime lab to be shared by Los Angeles County and city investigators—was brought in to fix the mess as executive director in May 2011.
Meanwhile, the only hope Los Angeles had of meeting federal deadlines for spending tens of millions of dollars meant that it had to get a mulligan so it could play past California law. That proved relatively easy to do thanks to a flexible minded committee chairwoman in the state legislature. “There was no way that we were giving up a great public safety tool just because someone forgot to dot the I’s and cross the T’s,” Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) told the Los Angeles Times. “Federal money isn’t so easy to come by these days and we can’t afford to let this get away.”
With Lowenthal leading the charge, the California legislature passed a law creating a unique loophole in state contracting law… so that L.A. could keep its federal grants. They couldn’t afford to let the money get away.
After the missed deadlines, technically illegal procurement plans, the shouting behind closed doors and the last-minute changes in state law, a new danger loomed. Again, it found that L.A. could not spend money in accord with the federal deadlines. This time, the enemy was time. Time itself.
If Los Angeles County and City didn’t spend $58 million by the federal deadline of May 2012, it would have to return that grant money. And they couldn’t possibly do it. Working at breakneck speed, the L.A.-RICS staff and board had presented a new RFP in November 2011. Bids came in from all over the country. There was simply no way the staff could get through the statutory contract evaluation process in time.
Even if the new contract was awarded in the coming weeks (as expected), there was simply no practical way for the contractor and its sub-contractor firms to spend that much money in that little time on approved uses. Despite their best efforts, it looked like L.A. was going to have to return some of its federal grant money…
That is, unless Fujioka became creative. And he did. He identified millions of dollars in existing city and county contracts where he could legitimately spend federal grant money in some way or another, to further the LA-RICS plan. All perfectly legal and perhaps bureaucratically brilliant—but driven by the fear of losing federal money and the impending wallop of missed federal deadlines. The County chief executive demanded that LA-RICS board members and county officials get their proposals in immediately. Panic was setting in. The money was about to go back to Washington.
One clever solution was dispatcher’s consoles. Police, fire and other dispatchers sit at a console loaded with equipment, sort of mini-Mission Control. But Houston, we have a problem. Those consoles were due to be replaced and new ones would not be compatible with the system LA-RICS was designing. Why not use the federal grant money to upgrade to new, compatible consoles? Anything to soak up federal grants before they left L.A. County unspent.
Meanwhile, the police and fire fighters’ unions began to have objections of their own. The LA-RICS system would literally be a matter of life and death for those unionized public-safety officers. “We understand that there are tight timelines the JPA [LA-RICS] is trying to meet, but we ask , what is the rush?” wrote Dave Gillotte, the president of Los Angeles County Fire Fighters Local 1014, in a letter to L.A. County chief executive Fujioka. “Why not make sure that we do it right? We don’t want to repeat the same mistakes of New York, Pennsylvania, and other failed systems across the country in our efforts to get it done quickly. It is heartbreaking for us to see that ten years after 9/11 that New York still does not have an operating system due to vendor failures. We strongly believe that we have one shot to get this right. We believe that with our collective lobbying efforts they [the Obama Administration] will be patient with us in order to ensure we have the best operating system possible for our men and women of public safety.””
is a good question, perhaps the fundamental question of LA-RICS. Why rush? Why can’t the deadlines be relaxed, as the union leaders thoughtfully suggested? And the unions even offered to lobby the Obama Administration for a deadline extension. So why rush?
Mallon knows the answer. “The federal government wanted those jobs in 2011. They will take them in 2012,” he said. “But not 2013.”
He’s right. The federal deadlines are very unlikely to be eased. The soft-spoken former Sheriff’s Department commander is too polite to say the obvious: it is presidential politics.
Why spend federal money today to create jobs in a future year when President Obama may not be in the White House to enjoy the credit? 2012 is an election year, after all. Meanwhile, the people of Los Angeles County wait for a radio system that will actually allow their more than 50 police and 31 fire departments to talk to each other.
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