Irregularities in the Selection Process for Districtwide Public Safety and Security Services
In November of 2021 the Board authorized a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a ~$125 million dollar, five-year contract for districtwide safety and security services (RFP 21-10). A nine-member selection committee for this RFP was chaired by former Deputy Chancellor Melinda Nish with five administrators, two faculty members (from AFT 1521), one community member, and one student. The panel reviewed and scored written proposals and subsequently interviewed three different bidders. Table 1 summarizes the interview scores for each bidder from a document obtained by a member of the public under the California Public Records Act.
Table 1 illustrates what appear to be significant scoring irregularities in the RFP selection process. Two of the administrator panelists (Irvin and Romali) appear to have exercised undue influence in the selection process by submitting exceedingly low scores for bidders competing with the Sheriffs’ Department, while giving the Sheriffs the maximum or near maximum scores (100 and 99). Each of these two panelists gave the Sheriffs’ proposal virtually insurmountable advantages that ranged from 81 to 91 points over the competing proposals. A similar pattern occurred for the technical scores, in which these same two panelists favored the Sheriffs’ proposal and gave very low scores to competing proposals. Pricing scores were determined separately for each bidder based on the cost of their proposal and therefore did not vary by panelist. The original scoresheet containing technical, pricing, and interview scores is posted on Board Docs. The combination of awarding such high scores to the Sheriffs and such low scores to the other bidders, creates such a statistical advantage that it essentially precludes all the other bids as well as the other panelists. According to LACCD evaluator instructions, “inappropriate conduct by any member of the Evaluation Committee, scoring, or non-scoring, is contrary to the fair and impartial nature of the selection process.” These instructions also specify that examples of undue influence would be any behavior indicative of unfair bias, such as attempting to sway the scores of others or awarding abnormally low or high scores not consistent with the quality of responses. The instructions also caution that abnormally high or low scores may be excluded from consideration, but it appears that this did not occur in this case. If the abnormally low and high scores from these two panelists had been excluded from the tabulations, another proposal (Allied Universal) would have received the highest final cumulative score and the Sheriffs proposal would have received the lowest score. Therefore, the RFP selection process appears to have been manipulated to ensure that competing bids would fail and the contract would be awarded to the Los Angeles Sheriffs.
On June 9, 2022 the Board held a special meeting to award a five-year contract for safety and security services (July 1, 2022-June 30, 2027) to the Los Angeles County Sheriffs for a total amount of approximately $127 million, with total cost not to exceed $24,441,618 for the first year of the contract (2022-2023). It is important to note that the Sheriffs’ proposal was several million dollars higher than the other proposals as well as the Sheriffs’ previous contracts with the District (see below). Furthermore, it is also important to mention that since this contract is paid out of the unrestricted general fund, all areas of the colleges have been and will continue to be impacted fiscally. This is especially noteworthy, since the administration at Trade Tech College recently announced massive (20-40%) class cuts for fiscal reasons.
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