Warning: lots of acronyms ahead; I tried to make their use clear and to avoid confusion, but apologies if there is any confusion. Thx.
In the days leading up to Tuesday's meeting of the Scottsdale City Council, expectations went from "this should be a fun meeting" when they had consideration of a new Sexually Oriented Business (SOB) ordinance (aka - the "stripper dis-employment" ordinance :) ) on the agenda to "this should be an incredibly boring meeting" when the SOB ordinance was continued to a later date.
Note: no official date has been set yet, but according to City Clerk Carolyn Jagger, it should come up again in late June.
The primary focus of the meeting was a General Fund allocation to some human services programs, including, senior services, domestic violence shelters, and drug and alcohol use prevention efforts in Scottsdale schools.
In essence, it was a "doing good deeds" meeting.
Turns out that even good deeds can be controversial in Scottsdale.
Scottsdale's Human Services Commission (HSC) presented a set of recommendations to the Council with agencies that had applied for money, how much they asked for, what they received last year, and the amounts that the Commission thought they should get this year.
In past years, the City had allocated a sum to the Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) that the school district would then disburse as it saw fit to fund alcohol/drug prevention activities and other counseling services in its schools.
For somewhere around 20 years, the SUSD contracted with the Scottsdale Prevention Institute (SPI) to provide those services and programs.
This year, however, the HSC changed its procedures; instead of allocating some of the money to the school district, it would allocate all funds for various service directly to the providers (including prevention services providers), and requested proposals (RFP) from interested providers.
After the RFP process, the HSC members rated the proposals; after all of the numbers were tallied, they had rated Community Bridges Inc. (CBI) higher than Scottsdale Prevention Institute and thus recommended that the contract for school-based prevention services go to CBI.
Sounds simple enough; change happens.
But that's where things got interesting. A contingent of SPI supporters was at Tuesday's City Council meeting to argue against the HSC recommendation; a number of CBI supporters were there to advocate for the recommendation.
During the discussion of the issue, a couple of pertinent facts came out:
...While the Council was notified of the HSC's change to it procedures, it never formally looked at and approved the changes. Most of the members of the City Council acknowledged that may have been a mistake.
...While the HSC had an overall rating for CBI that was higher than SPI's, individually, all but one member of the commission had SPI rated slightly higher. However, a single commissioner rated SPI so poorly, and CBI so highly, the overall rankings shifted in CBI's favor.
In the end, the City Council took one look at all of the red flags flying over this and promptly voted to allocate the money to SUSD and let them make the decision.
And for once, passing the buck was the right choice - this issue, while handled rather civilly on Tuesday night, has the potential to blow up into a big mess.
The whole "let's quietly change allocation procedures without really telling too many people or even giving it a public hearing" is bad enough, but when one unnamed HSC member voted in a manner so divergent from the rest of the commission that it changed the outcome in favor of a particular applicant, the whole affair started reeking of favoritism or worse.
Note: check out the "board members" pages of both groups' websites; the organizations are extremely well-connected politically.
To be fair, the primary reason given for continuing to contract with SPI was "we've worked with them for 20 years, They really know the schools and have built relationships with the students, teachers, and school board."
I've done enough work with optimizing manufacturing processes to know that "but that's the way we've always done it!" isn't a good reason to keep doing something a certain way, and that principle applies well in areas besides manufacturing.
This is one mess the Scottsdale City Council was wise to avoid. They have enough messes of their own making to deal with already. :)
Caveat: On the face of things, both organizations seem to be good ones doing good work with nothing that readily indicates corruption on either organization's part. This whole controversy may just be the result of sloppiness on the part of the HSC and City Council when the allocation procedure changes were implemented.
Having said that, I have some emails out trying to get copies of the ratings by each member of the HSC. Cross-checking the names and votes against each group's (SPI and CBI) directors might prove enlightening.
Updates as they become available.
EV Tribune coverage of the meeting here.
AZ Republic coverage here.
Later!
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