Chasing our Tail...

One of the items on tonight's City Commission agenda concerns the RFP for the Complete Count Committee. In previous posts, I detailed the situation and the problems with having political operatives being paid to head the City's effort in the 2010 Census. Others noticed this too, and after a few weeks in the position, the political operatives were released of their duties. This came after many stops and starts and after "much blood spilled on the altar of objectivity." The whole situation was handled poorly by the city administration. The Commission acted to solve the problem, acting on a somewhat urgent basis, and put together an RFP for a "firm" to head-up the complete count effort. The due date for responses to the RFP was last Friday.

One of the alternatives, only at the last moment identified by the City Manager, was to have the Community Relations Board (CRB) head up the effort. This made great sense as it was a new board that already counted among its members people of the community with links to neighborhood associations and other groups in the city that could assist with getting residents counted. Their combined connections could achieve the Complete Count Committee goal and do so on a volunteer basis - not on relying someone to be paid to conduct the effort.

In order not to miss the bus, the CRB actually responded to the RFP. While not technically a firm, it wanted to assert itself as an entity that was already existing, politically neutral - or at least representative of the make-up of our community, and present itself as a choice for the City Commission to consider when reviewing the other proposals when they were opened.

As it turns out, no "firms" responded to the RFP, but the same political operatives that were released from their duties previously responded, along with the CRB. According to the back-up material, both are considered "non-responsive" as the city believes the CRB did not have the authority to sign the form and that the other response lacked some of the required information. That being said, the City Commission still has the right to alter the requirements, discard all responses or essentially do whatever it wants as a body.

Back at the beginning of this episode, the City Manager asked the Commission - one assumes members of the current "majority" - for ideas to head up the Complete Count effort. In an act of potential political patronage, Commissioner Golden recommended Annabeth Karson. The City Manager assumed this would be on a volunteer basis, but it turns out that Ms. Karson required payment for her work and she needed a paid assistant as well. The total amount allocated for these two positions was $30,000.

In turns out that for the period the two worked, they were paid $4,000. There is some question as to whether or not any work product, information, contacts were retained and available to whoever would end up doing the work. That work product is really property of the city - actually the public-at-large since these are all public documents. It may be a more serious problem if that information is produced for whoever ends up doing the work.

If you look over the responses, it becomes clear that the City gets more "bang for the buck" using the CRB, with the bulk of money going towards actual outreach efforts, collateral material, etc rather than most of the money going to pay salaries of individuals.

So, what the City Commission should do tonight is scrap the notion that there ever was an RFP and give the job to the rightful entity - the CRB. If it doesn't, it really amounts to a snub of another volunteer board (like has been done through past poor treatment of the Planning and Zoning Board and the Community Redevelopment Agency). If the City Commission chooses to go with the political operatives, then they send a message that Lake Worth is the home of machine politics and that to matter here you have to subscribe to the prevailing ideologies exposed by the three person majority.

Many think they know what the answer will be tonight - how unfortunate it will be if they are correct. The best outcome would be for Ms. Karson and Ms. Coolican to abandon their requirement to be paid and work with the CRB. In the end, an accurate Census count is critical for the City and they should work on it in a volunteer basis, as they do in various political campaigns. I guess we should assume they aren't paid for those duties, but who really knows?