View full sizeMetroHealth System’s main campus. CLEVELAND, Ohio — MetroHealth System’s board members canceled a vote this week on a new policy for hiring consultants, architects and other professionals after one member attacked the proposal for failing to require public bidding.”We are not improving our procurement policy,” MetroHealth Trustee John Moss says in a letter sent this week to fellow trustees. “We are merely codifying and re-approving the old way of doing business and not actively promoting transparency, competition, and efficiencies.”Bill Gaskill, a long-time MetroHealth board member and chair of the audit committee, cancelled the vote on the policy, telling a group of executives and board members Wednesday that “we have a lot of concern about the issue and a lot of information has just been given to us.”MetroHealth, which is subsidized by taxpayers, has been under scrutiny for months about how it hires consultants. In April, the Plain Dealer reported that MetroHealth had spent more than $7 million during the previous 12 months with the consulting company that formerly employed MetroHealth Chief Executive Mark Moran. Since then, Cuyahoga County Councilman Dave Greenspan has said that he believes MetroHealth had approved a total of about $21 million in spending with the consultant Booz & Co. since Moran became the system’s leader.  Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald created a task force in May to review the county hospital’s operations. That task force released recommendations in July, and Fitzgerald said he wanted MetroHealth to award consulting contracts through “a public, competitive process.”FitzGerald said this week that he is still waiting for a formal response from MetroHealth. In general, FitzGerald said MetroHealth and any entity “should bid out everything that you can as long as it’s practical. Exceptions to that should be very rare.”Moss’ letter to the trustees included copies of the new procurement policy for Cuyahoga County as well the policies for City of Cleveland, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority and the Cleveland Municipal School District. He noted that all require competitive bidding with limited exceptions.MetroHealth’s proposed policy, which Moran submitted and recommended for board approval, states that all purchases of professional services must include a bidding process.However, it then goes on to outline that in some cases the bidding process can be narrowed to a pre-selected list of professionals. In other cases, MetroHealth may select a sole source for professional services, such as when the professionals have “unique” knowledge of the project or MetroHealth.Moss wrote that he was most concerned about the sole source exception because it does not follow best practices used in the private or public sectors.MetroHealth Spokeswoman Phyllis Marino said neither Gaskill nor Moran were available for comment. The board this week announced a special November meeting to talk about the proposed policy.  Moss has been pushing for public bids since early in the year, when he said he would no longer vote for any no-bid contract over $50,000. Since April, Moss has voted against more than a dozen contracts with consultants and others because they allowed the hospital pay out more than $50,000 for services that did not go through a public bidding process.  Most recently, he declined to vote Wednesday for a contract worth up to $150,000 plus “reasonable expenses” to extend work with Cleveland branding firm Melamed Riley to the end of the year. The board had previously extended Melamed’s contract in April, approving up to $200,000 for production services. The firm created MetroHealth’s “The Comeback” campaign that is running in print and television advertisements.Moss’ letter makes clear that he wants genuine policy changes to help the public believe in MetroHealth’s integrity following the revelations about the health system’s role in the long-running county corruption investigation, in which more than 50 county employees and businesspeople have pleaded guilty. Two MetroHealth officials have been convicted of accepting bribes in exchange for contracts with the taxpayer-subsidized hospital.  “Restoring public faith and trust in the vital public asset that is MetroHealth must be our highest priority as a board,” Moss wrote.  Last year, former MetroHealth construction manager Thomas Greco was found guilty of accepting gift cards and other favors over eight years in exchange for helping East-West Construction obtain MetroHealth business. In January, John Carroll, former vice president of facilities and construction services at MetroHealth, was sentenced in U.S. District Court to nine years in prison after he pleaded guilty to bribery-related charges involving how he performed his job. Recent documents filed by the U.S. Justice Department show Carroll used one contractor as his personal entertainment bureau, calling regularly for tickets to sports events and concerts.Moran, too, has said he wants to improve the system for awarding contracts. During an April audit committee meeting with the board, Moran said he wanted controls over construction contracts to be “pretty stringent.”  At that same meeting, the MetroHealth board approved the hiring of KPMG to review the health system’s contracting and bidding of professional services. A draft of KPMG’s report was completed in August and included a review of no-bid contracts with Booz as well as work done by the architect firm SmithGroup, which was hired through a bid process and designed the proposed Middleburg Heights health center announced this week.KPMG noted in the draft report that MetroHealth’s organization-wide procurement policies were not “fully defined” and that compliance is not formally tracked.KPMG said that even though MetroHealth is not required to use a formal public bidding process under the Ohio Revised Code, the hospital might see better prices by “more systematically” using competition. The consulting firm stated in a slide presentation this month that new policies are expected to be accepted by the end of this year.

Similar Posts:

Share