In October of 2009 an effort to streamline the procure to pay process and maximize the use of available recources, Jim Ley commissioned a review. During this review [here] observations were discussed with county management and recomendations were made. County management ignored the recomendations and Sarasota County procurement problems have escalated into a scandal.
Thank you Palm Beach county! If not for your investigation leading to the arrest of Rodney Jones, the citizens of Sarasota County would still be in the dark and the county would still be going about their business as they see fit.
8/20/2011 “Sarasota Clerk seeks to clarify her role”
Clerk of the Circuit Court Karen Rushing on Friday attempted to clarify her role as an overseer of county spending, refuting any notion that her office could have prevented the recent purchasing scandal in Sarasota County.
8/3/2011 “Purchasing progress”
The probe didn’t result in criminal charges against past or present county workers. Reports from the investigation cogently explain why violations of criminal laws were not alleged, despite instances of mismanagement and ethical lapses; the state attorney’s office agreed with the investigators’ explanations and conclusions.
8/1/2011 “Terry Lewis plans his own investigation”
Lewis will be interviewing employees named in last week’s Sheriff’s Office report that summarized findings from a criminal investigation of county purchasing card use. He will also be speaking with their supervisors and listening to audio tapes of interviews the detectives conducted.
7/29/2011 The Sheriff investigation complete. No charges filed. Business as usual.
7/29/2011 “No charges filed in Sarasota scandal”
“There is now a heightened awareness with everyone using a p-card,” Thaxton said. “And that heightened awareness will not be short-lived. This was a spanking.”
7/24/2011 “Lawsuit filed to keep audit notes secret”
“The law says the work papers of an audit that is not complete are not public,” Rushing said. “I am liable if I release a confidential record by those who might be harmed.”
7/13/2011 “Audits pinpoint county’s flaws”
A national purchasing group recommended 151 policy changes that are now being made by the county; four months of news coverage have documented cases of favoritism and negligence dating back to at least 2004. The clerk’s audits provide a close look at dozens of purchasing decisions made between Oct. 1, 2009, and Sept. 30, 2010.
7/13/2011 “Expired contracts plague Sarasota County”
The commissioners grudgingly voted to extend the contracts, but had to do so without reviewing the prices being paid. The contracts had all been expired for years, but nobody was tracking them. The expired contracts were discovered amid an effort to fix systemic purchasing problems that have recently come to the forefront.
7/12/2011 “County workers by-passed bidding rules”
Two dozen Sarasota County workers violated purchasing rules with their government credit cards last fiscal year, racking up $6.2 million in charges for goods and services that should have been awarded by competitive bid.
Their supervisors could have spotted the violations with a few clicks of a computer mouse, but did not.
6/24/2011 “Close to $22M in no-bid contracts”
Today I started a spreadsheet to track how much Sarasota County money had been spent in a way that was not by usual competitive bidding processes. This is a work in progress and is incomplete but so far I have identified $21.98 million since 2003 that was spent in a way that was not competitive.
6/11/2011 “How the piggybacking began”
Once Chaz had that contract in hand, the company started shopping it to other municipalities. Instead of independently bidding a new contract, certain cities and counties as far off as Sarasota simply used the Delray contract terms, a process known as piggybacking. Manhole repair began generating hundreds of thousands of dollars. Chaz, investigators wrote, kept the piggybacking going with a stream of gifts, trips and cash cards.
6/6/2011 “Another county bid gone awry”
As government contracts go, few are more basic than the one Sarasota County officials have for a company to clear plants and grass from canals. But that contract has been in limbo for nearly three years, repeatedly fumbled by county employees whose job is to hire private companies to handle government business.
5/16/2011 “Emergency meeting requested on Jim Ley’s job”
Despite the ongoing purchasing scandal, Ley, 61, said he does not plan to resign the post he has held for 14 years.
4/30/2011 “Warning signs before county scandal”
Commissioners Jon Thaxton and Joe Barbetta have said they raised concerns about the county’s procurement policies, but they were often dismissed after staff looked into them.
4/26/2011 “Sarasota takes the cake”
The consultant hired to help fix problems with Sarasota County’s purchasing practices found things in such disarray that he joked to his co-workers that he ought to get hazardous duty pay
4/25/2011 “Got a complaint? Pay up first”
They didn’t stop the practice of piggybacking contracts. They didn’t abandon the approach of letting prospective bidders write specifications. They didn’t overhaul a system that often seems to tilt toward national conglomerates at the expense of smaller, local companies.
They didn’t offer any of the reforms the locals had demanded.
Instead, they prohibited companies from contacting any of the commissioners during any part of the bidding procedures. They also started to assess a $2,000 fee to anyone who protested an award.
4/11/2011 “Sarasota worker had earlier contract controversy”
I do feel that there were some management failures of varying degrees at lower levels in the organization,wrote Ley, who added that he views “the decision to rehire Mr. Jones, and the assignment decision made subsequent to the rehire, as a lapse in management judgment of significant order.”
“Citizen challenges contract” By Ed Scott Sun News EXCERPT: Paralegal Michael Barfield of Sarasota said during the Tuesday commission meeting that the county used the Economic Development Corporation of Sarasota County to bypass the county’s required procurement process to hire an architect — Californiabased Moule & Polyzoides — for The Fruitville Initiative, a future development project east of Interstate 75.
Sarasota County purchasing “TOPICS” from the Sarasota Herald Tribune
