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Jeb Bush's Desire to Privatize Everything
And the resulting mess that follows:
| quote: | OurFlorida: center of coziness
By Mary Ann Lindley
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Helping hurricane victims buys our governor a lot of good will and takes Floridians' minds off the ill winds that have been blowing in the capital for years.
Here in Tallahassee, if not downstate, we are all too familiar with squalls that blow through town routinely, the aftermath of privatizing major public services.
Cozying up to politically well-connected private enterprises is Jeb Bush's obsession, in keeping with the ideology that private enterprise is always better and smarter than public service. Privatization will be the legacy he leaves behind in our "pay-to-play" town. Pity the next governor, be she a Republican or a Democrat, who has to clean up the mess.
In recent weeks, the executive branch of Florida government has weathered many embarrassments. Or at least events that you would think would be embarrassing if you weren't a complete ideological robot.
Kim Bahrami, who was No.1 in the State Technology Office, left her job abruptly in February, for example, and by July had a fabulous new executive position with BearingPoint, the company to which she had awarded a $126 million contract.
It's a "common business practice," said BearingPoint of the hiring. Common to hire a former state employee who enriched your company with a multimillion-dollar grant? Another description is payback.
The state auditor's office thinks the contract, which did away with 150 state jobs, might have been illegally bid as well. That wouldn't be surprising given the way the state's bidding processes have been worked over during the Bush administration. In addition to irregular methods of evaluating one bid over another, which has been one of the state auditor's concerns, it's almost impossible for losing bidders to legally challenge a contract anymore.
Building hurdles into that process is the legacy of former Department of Management Services chief Cynthia Henderson, who found such administrative challenges bothersome. That is, once she got over the surprise of finding out that they were in fact a long-standing and legal part of state contracting.
Last week when the chief of the Department of Children & Families finally resigned, it was after several weeks of treading political waters, trying to explain away cozy relationships with a major DCF private contractor.
Secretary Jerry Regier, as well as two top administrators, are now off the state payroll because of ethical slippage - staying at the beach house and going to birthday parties and otherwise not keeping an arms-length businesslike distance from executives of Vector Solutions Inc. The company holds more than $9million in state contracts thanks to decisions Regier and his team make.
DCF is now preparing to get bids on contracts that could be worth billions to process eligibility requests and checks for food stamps, so taxpayers, brace yourselves for the next exciting chapter of who-you-know privatization. Money squandered on bids that aren't as upright as they should be is money lost to help the state's most vulnerable kids and families that DCF is created to protect.
Another outrage that doesn't involve personal coziness so much as sloppy management is the demise of an $86.7 million contract with Accenture, a technology giant that the State Technology Office has been doing business with. A state audit shows Accenture, as well as BearingPoint, having had an unfair advantage over other vendors in the bidding.
The State Technology Office has been a mess almost from the beginning, and there are many who wonder what, in reality, it does except keep up the MyFlorida.com portal. Which is nice if you don't care to know what isn't functioning in YourFlorida.
The governor's response has been to set up a new system for evaluating contracts and giving it a can-do name: Center of Excellence. It's supposed to develop statewide standards for deciding whether it's a good deal for the state to outsource work or have state workers continue doing it.
This - coming six years into his administration - is typical of the saying-makes-it-so way government is now run in our state. If you give a project a catchy name, and keep repeating that name with plenty of can-do enthusiasm, it doesn't matter if any substantive changes occur. Besides, if you know deep down in your dogma that you're doing the right thing for you and all those who think like you do, then why bother with any objective outside measurements?
What really needs to happen here, but for political reasons almost certainly won't, is for the state attorney - in whose jurisdiction state government resides - or the U.S. Attorney's Office to take a sweeping look into the coziness of Florida government. But pay-to-play is so pervasive in Florida now that I would be stunned if either office has the courage and will to inquire.
Pity the next governor, be she a Republican or a Democrat, who has to clean up the mess.
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/demo...ion/9566165.htm |
Now I will state this: I'm all for privitization if it's clearly shown that the private sector can do the business cheaper and more efficiently.
But why does it seem that cronyism always tends to follow?
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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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