The Department of Education speaks up
Posted by andrew - 20/03/09 at 12:03 pmAs we’ve conducted this investigation, getting any response from the Department of Education has been difficult – until now. On Wednesday morning, we were granted a 45-minute interview with Executive Director of Contracts and Purchasing David N. Ross.
Ross also sits as the head of the Committee on Contracts, which recommends which no-bid contracts should be approved by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein.
In his testimony before the City Council last November, City Comptroller William C. Thompson told council members that the awarding of no-bid contracts by the education department lacks oversight and has ballooned from a reported $700,000 per year to more than $47 million annually.
But even while faced with this stark difference in numbers, Ross denied that no-bid contracting has appreciably increased since mayoral control of schools.
“The idea that we’re out here doing tremendous numbers of exceptions without review is a completely bogus argument,” he said. “In proportion to our budget, it’s not a lot.”
To emphasize his point, Ross used a colored pie chart that showed less than 1 percent of the “Goods and Services” budget was allocated for exceptions to competitive bidding for fiscal year 2009.
Later in the interview, when asked about the discrepancy between the education department’s list of no-bid contracts and the comptroller’s list, Ross responded that his office sends all contracts that are over $25,000 to the comptroller for registration.
This may be true. But when we compared the comptroller’s list to the Department of Education’s list for 2006, for example, we found that only 17 of the 42 no-bid contracts for that year had actually been registered by the Comptroller’s office.
“But different things happen along the way,” Ross said, referring to the discrepancy. “There are some contracts that the comptroller hasn’t registered, there are some contracts that don’t get through the bureaucracy quickly enough. It can be difficult to reconcile that number.”
However, sources in the Comptroller’s office have said in separate interviews that the Department of Education does not register all contracts with the City Comptroller.
According to the Comptroller’s office, the Department of Education registers contracts with the comptroller on a voluntary basis, in effect picking and choosing which contracts to send for registration. The Comptroller’s office disagrees with this position and believes that the education department should register all contracts, like all other city agencies.
Former communications director for Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, Jim Vlasto, who spent the last several years investigating the increased awarding of no-bid contracts by the education department, said what makes it even harder to keep track of no-bid contracts is the fact that Committee on Contracts meetings are closed to the public.
Ross acknowledged that meetings are closed to the public but also pointed out that the agenda for the committee is published well ahead of time, both on the department’s Web site and in The City Record.
“So the fact that we don’t have a public meeting is not, in my view, to suggest that we don’t have a public process,” he said.
Because the Committee on Contracts is technically an advisory board and only makes recommendations on contracts and not final decisions, they are not required by the Open Meetings Law to conduct their meetings in a public forum.
Ross said his favorite reason for having a closed meeting was that it allowed the committee to “have a very lively and robust debate around the actions that are brought before the committee.” In this way, Ross said, the committee can provide the chancellor with a thorough review and honest recommendation.
We are still awaiting our Freedom of Information Law request for the Committee on Contracts minutes to be filled.
