Travis County Commssioners Court
July 8, 2003
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Item 11
Number 11 -- let me make another motion to approve all of the routine items. That was seconded by Commissioner Davis. Favor? That passes by unanimous vote. Thank you very much. Number 11 is to discuss and take appropriate action regarding contract number ps 990019 lb with accuscreen, incorporated for professional drug and alcohol testing. A, termination of contract ps 990019 lb with accuscreen incorporated for failure to comply with terms and conditions of the contract, and b is professional service exemption order for a period of 90 days until a solicitation can be awarded that we discussed may 1st. And these are the representatives from accuscreen, I take it?
>> yes, sir.
>> judge, Commissioners, I知 the Travis County purchasing agent. Back in August of 1998 we did a solicitation for drug testing. We ordered that contract at the time to comply with the consortium corporation. About a year ago the contract was assigned to accuscreen. We have had -- over the course of four years we've had issues with this contract because this is a county-wide county that provides drug testing not only for employees that have to be drug screened because their job qualifications or requirements, but also our clients are a lot of probationers, especially in the drug court and the court system. Because of the nature of this contract, it's been very hard to coordinate and work out some of the issues, but staff has tried consistently to do that over the term of this agreement. Back in March when this contract was assigned over to accuscreen, the problems intensified. Staff has worked numerous times with the contractor. The contractor has tried to make improvements, unless, of course, some of the problems that they were having was staff turnover. Of course, those things are sometimes unavoidable, but we mainly have concerns that the tests are not being done timely, causing some of our cases to be delayed and even thrown out because of the results. We've just had overrule problems with this contract -- overall problems with this contract and all of the users are in agreement that we should terminate this contract and try to find another provider for this service. And accuscreen is here and I believe they would like to make comments on their behalf.
>> okay. If we could get them to hold off for a minute. All users means what?
>> we have health & human services, child protective services, our human resources department, domestic relations, the sheriff, the criminal courts, drug diversion program, pretrial services, transportation and natural resources, emergency medical services, juvenile court. Those are all the users of this service. It is truly a county wide contract. We spend about $100,000 in the last 12 months on this service. Some of the departments are doing some drug testing in-house, but this is a higher level of testing that we had contracted for.
>> all the departments you just mentioned, they would support terminating the contract?
>> yes, sir.
>> sid, what do we do if the court decides to terminate the contract based on what we're hearing from the users of the contract with accuscreen, what happens in the interim? Because I知 concerned about the accuracy. I think it's very important the accuracy of testing and all these kinds of things by the users within Travis County. What happens in the window, per se, if the court decides? I知 longing for someone to continue to do -- looking for someone to continue to do the work, but then do the work according to what our standards are as far as getting the results in a timely manner.
>> our intent is to put out a new solicitation, but in the interim we've been contactg some of the other -- when we did this initially there were six proposers, so we've been calling some of those other contractors to see if we can provide the service. Dan man sewer has been in contact with txdot to see if they can take some of the testing for us. We were also looking at a state contract that we could potentially buy off of. So we are looking into that. And I think we feel confident that we can find folks to do this for us in the interim until we complete it.
>> we've been trying to work with the vendor?
>> yes, sir.
>> and as recently as when?
>> I believe last week. Did y'all meet last week? I know all through the summer we've had several meetings. There have been two meetings in June with contractor and then there's daily contact back and forth between the departments and the contractor to try to work out issues. When was the last time we met?
>> probably the most significant we had, judge, was on the 13th of June where we meet with mr. Peter decamp and we outlined at that time the patio severity of the problems, the number of problems. Mr. Decamp committed at that time on the 13th to have it all cleaned up by the 20th of June. That did not happen. We had another meeting to explain why it hasn't happened. We called our customers in to explain to mr. Decamp and to mr. Calvo here. That occurred on or about the -- I think it was the 20th of June, 23, somewhere in there, but there was a second significant meeting. That has not significantly improved the situation.
>> okay. And what's the vendor's response?
>> I知 paul daniels, sir. I知 acting as interim operations manager for our company. This is david herring ton, mike calvo. Yes, sir, there have been problems with this contract. I知 a little bit new to the situation, but this contract does date back five years. And we acquired a company known as assessnet at the end of 2002 that was servicing this contract. We entered into a strategic relationship with that company that led to an acquisition. We're in the background research business and we needed a partner to offer drug screening service for -- to compliment our services that we had. As it turned out when we started to take over the assets of assessnet, we didn't realize what was going on with that company. As it turned out, we bought something that was in a lot of trouble. The assets didn't belong to the company. The contract apparently was in trouble here. And there were numerous misrepresentations that they had made to us. That ended up costing us I think somewhere around 250 to $300,000 to survive through the acquisition transition. When we started servicing the county contract, we were in the throes watching our assets disappear from the employees of assessnet. We got in trouble and couldn't pay them all exactly when we were supposed on to, so we ended up with a situation where we had some disgruntled employees. That's when our troubles began to get worse with the contract. We were new to this type of business. The company that we had that bought assessnet, we didn't know about drug screening, it was not our specialty. We left all the assessnet personnel in place to run that business. When we started running into the difficulties with the payroll, we ended up with a couple that were mad at us. And we had to file a police report. One of the employees became disgruntled to the point that he changed the access codes to our analyzer and put us in a bind. Not only that, but then we had a subsequent break-in in our south Austin facility that we had a police report filed. And we were at risk now with that location, so we had to move the equipment out of there. In the interim we had another location in corpus christi, so we tried to funnel all the specimens from here down there, and as things would happen, sometimes it gets from bad to worse. Our equipment malfunctioned there. So in a transition of trying to get from south Austin back to our spicewood springs office, we had some downtime that cause caused our client some very serious problems with their samples. And I met mr. Holder I think on the 23rd and I introduced myself to him and I explained to him where I fit in in all this, and he basically explained to me the problems that they were having with us. And after I met with him, I had to agree with him that the problems were pretty numerous. Anyway, we did have a meeting on the 23rd -- back on the 13th, I think, with mr. Decamp and mr. Calvo. And we just made a promise that we said it is our intention to keep the contract and honor the business that you've given us. The contract is very important to us. It makes up a major part of our business. And so as such, we made a commitment to straighten up our timeliness, especially the timeliness. I think there's a couple of programs here that may have the drug diversion programs, and it's one of the programs that have brought a lot of people into our facility. So we committed to turn our program around and getting results back in a very timely manner. Now, that's what I -- I came into the operations from dallas. I transferred down here. I知 a shareholder and equity person in the company. And I saw that we had an operations malfunction, so I committed to come down here and get involved in it myself. I知 not collecting a salary, I just have an interest in the company, so it meant something to me to help out in the areas that we were having flaws. So we got our analyzer back up and running. We have the only analyzer I believe in the whole entire Austin area that does the samples, the urine specimens that are in the cups, not the test strips. We do those tw too, but we have a toshiba, a large machine. Once we got it back up -- and I have to admit that we had a terrible delay and everyone was put out by that. Once we got our machine back up, we started processing results immediately. I would offer that when we made the commitment to turn the results around, I in particular got involved in the short program. I have not met the lady in person that is over that program, but there is a department head there, her name is ms. Labrado. We processed the results that we got from our facility down here on guadalupe street. We opened a facility down here to make it easier to facilitate the business, especially for those programs, back in March. I became involved in making sure that in a procedural manner that these people have sign-in sheets. These people coming from that department, they sign in at our department. We collect the samples and we bring them to our facility and we test them, then we submit the results back. It's a handling process that we've had to learn our way through because the people that we've brought on from assessnet and then left us and we had to trim back, they didn't teach us what they needed to teach us. So I submit that we had to do some learning. Anyway, we come to the point of around the 17th -- 16th, 17th and the 18th of this month, I became involved on the short program and I started overseeing the transmissions myself of the results from the specimens back to the short program. I would collect the sign sign-in sheets, I would collect the results, I would organize them in such a way that they would follow the sign-in sheets so all you had to do was flip through them. They were all present and accounted for. I would fax them to ms. Labrado with a cover letter. At the end of each day in order to be redundant and to honor our commitment, I would drive down to the office over here on this street nearby where the short program is and I would hand deliver a duplicate set of the same results with the sign-in sheet so that perhaps if something had gone wrong with the transmission of the fax that she would have a backup copy. Now, we've been doing that since the 16th. We've been hopefully flooding them with paperwork, and we went from results that were a week or two out -- I would admit that we had a terrible time there. We turned our results around in 12 hours. We were getting them within 24 hours. And this contract, I can't exactly say what the results are supposed to be done in, but outside of the contract, we committed to get them back the next day, so that's what we started doing and we started running our results -- I must confess that in order to overcome our shortcomings, which again, we've had many, it took countless hours and time and commitment from a smaller staff. We've had people working around the clock 48 hours to get our equipment calibrated, operating, and doing the job, the right job that we're supposed to do. I just cannot express enough how hard these people worked in order to honor this coitment. Now, when I started shipping those results back, we started getting them overnight. And I had hoped that they would concur in the departments, at least I was sending my results to because they are the biggest department that send customers to our facility over here on guadalupe. There are numerous other departments. I wish I had been here long enough to be more familiar with the cps program and the pretrial programs and all the programs. I had a meeting with mr. Holder the other day, and as an operations manager, I had to come down and say, mr. Holder, what have we done wrong? Because I really exactly know what it is. And he shared with me that i've been over this once with somebody, i've been over it with somebody else and again with somebody else. Those people aren't here because they've all gone. We ran into a payroll snag. And it's just the way it turned out. So I asked him what we were supposed to be doing. And I learned the severity of the situation at that time. That we'd be up here on the eighth. So I haven't had a chance to learn some of the cps program, how it works, or any of the other programs, but I do know the short program. I have the the list that when they told us to perform that we performed. Admit everything to us. We sacrificed everything that we know how to do. I believe we understand the system. I believe we can submit the results in a timely manner. And I would also say that right now our results are coming back in 24 hours. I don't know that we can do it any faster than that. I don't know if the contract calls for any faster than that, but we can have results back in 24 hours. I would also --
>> for the short program or for all the programs?
>> for all the programs, the entire Travis County program, we can have the results back overnight is that right?
>> yes. And that includes the county clients as well as other clients that we have. I've personally taking a vested interest in this. I am overseeing all of the actual results that they get processed, like like -- like mr. Davis said, we have worked around the clock, I have personally worked around the clock several weeks in a row to make sure and still that everything gets processed in a timely manner.
>> when did you first learn of your problems? In other words, I heard you say something about malfunctioning. When was the closest that you found out you were experiencing problems and the end result is service and how service can be affected. When did you learn that you were having problems with the product as far as the testing and getting the test results, the alcohol and drug testing results?
>> well, sir, I came down here on the 16th day of June. That was my first arrival into our mix. I live in dallas, I live in a little town outside dallas, north of dallas, raising a family there. I helped start the company that acquired assessnet, so I began to learn that we were having problems through the month of may and
>> I knew we were having trouble, but I didn't know the severity until I got down here. I would have to concur with the county that -- and I didn't know how bad it was until we got hold of it, but we didn't make their jobs any easier and it kind of got worse with us when we had the analyzer problems and the break-in and the guy punching out our code so we couldn't get there. We had a disgruntled employee who hadn't got paid and he did that to the machine. And I learned of the problems in late may and June and so I left my family and I commute down here from dallas every week. I come Monday morning and I leave Friday afternoon and go back home. It makes the weekends shorted, but I learned of the problems when I got down here. I was amazed at what I had seen. And I haven't had an opportunity to meet you, but I shared that with mr. Holder there. That I couldn't really see how things had gotten that way. But at the time I showed up, our problems with our analyzer were ending. And we were bringing the machines back online. This thing is a very large piece of equipment, and it's transferred from one place to another and that's quite an undertaking. It's about as big as a volvo and it weighs about as much. And so anyway, we had to transfer the equipment and transfer all related data up to our other office and then rehooking that machine up is also a little bit difficult. And I知 not a technical person. I don't understand that. I know how to run a company, I can run books and I can handle operations, but I can't handle in a kind of equipment. So when I arrived on June the 16th, we were in the process of processing all the results and moving the program into compliance. I already learned -- I had learned that they had had this meeting already with mr. Holder and I believe several of the department heads. They put our company on observation. And rightfully so I would have to say, rightfully so. There was a period of time in which to correct the problems has been kind of narrow. The program is a little bit difficult to administer. Since i've come alongside the program and to interact with all the departments, I have learned that it's a little bit complex to interact with certain of the departments, and things have to be in such a way that they can pass through one department and then go to another one and correct it for them and everybody has to have the list corrected and be proper, and you can't have any mistakes made. And with the volume of clients that they send, it's a little bit of an undertaking to get it right. But I believe that we've got it right and our equipment is up and running. And it is functioning properly and we're running -- we're not running 24 hours a day, but right now we don't need to, but our equipment can do it, and we're able to return the results in 24 hours. And I would hope that the -- I administer the short program myself because that seems to be one of our biggest contributors to our program is many people come. I think 50 people a day some days. No fewer than 30 on average, I think. Unless -- but i've seen the sign-in sheets and i've been seeing those things for three weeks.
>> you believe your performance is satisfactory and conforms to the contract today.
>> yes, sir, I do.
>> and you believe that that has been the case how long?
>> only recently. Only within the last several days, within the last 10 days. When our analyzer was brought back to performance and moved and brought back online, we were able to start doing the job that we committed to do to begin with. And that's to perform the drug screening for the entire county, at least all the departments. I don't know if it's the entire county. I may be incorrect there. But it's a number of departments. And in an effort to correct other problems that we've had administrationwise, the handling of information within our company back to the various departments of the county is -- is the kind of situation where it requires a certain person to be the one to do -- to handle this business. If there's one guy they can go to to refer all the types of programs they've developed and we've got david haring ton here. Wees developed a relationship, if you will, with most of the department heads, if not all of them, and we have gotten our program with Travis County to be able to get the results back in a timely manner, which is overnight. The next morning. We should have those back within 24 hours. We gather them up, we run them through the day and evening. Mr. Harrington, it's his position to oversee our guadalupe facility, which is right down the street. And we even had to go through extra expense downs there to make modifications in that place to bring it up to standards. Some of you may have been down there on a visit lately. But we believe we need a man they can go to instead of the various people they've had to go to. They've had problems with our company because they've had to go through, as you say -- I don't remember your names.
>> said grimes. -- cyd grimes.
>> they need one person to interact with who can handle all our answers, interact with all the department heads. He's met them and knows them. We do the work back at our facility and get the results back.
>> can you tell me as far as the department is concerned the complients that they -- the complaints that they have gotten in the past, how far they probably went back as far as dealing with this particular vendor?
>> well, as stated, they took over from assessnet in March of '03; however, we've had problems prior to that. We've come back -- in the backup we talk about all the things that we tried to do to correct the situation. Particularly untimely test results, getting the wrong results, getting test results from a different agency. They had a problem coordinating within the county the different agencies. Receive results on Saturday. I知 not sure what that means. Just the paperwork is inconsistent and incorrect. We've been double billed. We've had a real billing problem also, just in -- and there's also been some instances where we were told that different sex observers were watching different sex clients, like a man watching a woman or a woman watching man, and those are very serious accusations. So there's just been continued problems. The departments are really -- they really feel like they have done everything that they can to get the contractor to comply with the contract and provide the services as they needed, and they really are just tired of trying to help them come along and learn the business and do what they -- what we thought we were hiring, someone that knew the program, that knew protocols and that could handle the business. They just have not been able to do that. So the departments are just ready to find someone else to help them out.
>> okay. Thank you.
>> may I offer something in response to that? What she has said, she offered something about there was Saturday reporting, which nobody comes on Saturday. She mentioned programs there's been double billing. And the observers, I would have to say that that can't happen, that cannot possibly happen. But in response to the other problems you see, when you bring back the information and handling of papers that come back from the places where they collect the samples, there's a chance the document -- it comes and accompanies each sample, comes back to our laboratory facility. At that point we have two processes that take place. We have a data entry because the computer works in conjunction with the analyzer. They both interface and work together. In our employee turnover, there has been some data entry problems. A person has on occasion put on there a date that would say Saturday, when in fact there's nobody coming in on Saturday. So we have to catch that error and correct it. It's a data entry situation. On double billings, i've learned from ms. Britt, I believe it is, that our billing was goofy when we first started trying to get it. We didn't understand the -- the guys in assessnet didn't teach us how to be correct in the billing to go into the contract county. The list has been to be contract. If you have the short program you have to have the short names on it and nothing else. If you're going to send the bill to county, it has to be absolutely correct. And if it's correct it has to go to audit. The wording has to be correct. They don't care about the names, they care about the wording, the price, the description and the commodity code. I've lerntd that since I spoke to him the other day. So in an effort to correct some of our billings, and we are not even current on our billings because we don't even feel like we have the -- I hesitate to use the word, but we've held off on billings to work on problems. We've made billings secondary to fix the problems. We're just getting results back on time and getting things handle. So we corrected a billing and sent it back for the same things that we had already done that I was informed that the audit department was reviewing and needed a new bill. And you might review that as a double billing. But in fact, our first bill was bad, it was incorrect in some way, shape, fashion or form, and then we submitted a corrected form and what if it's not absolutely correct? Our billing has not been up to par. It just hasn't been good. I've witnessed that since i've come here. My job is to overz that not only with Travis County, but with all our customers. Our billing is not current. Anyway, we've told the various departments we're not going to be submitting bills until we at least get our system right. That will be secondary with our interactions. There's a segment on the report that says observations and categories on there. There's dates, there's observations and a person's name who does the observing. Now, we run the facility the correct way and we don't have, I can assure you -- and I don't mean to counter what you're saying as though we're not telling the truth, but we simply do not do it the wrong way. We have male observers and we have fe mile -- mail observers.
>> that's the way you do it now?
>> that's how we've always done it. We've never cross-observed. We just can't --
>> mr. Daugherty has a question.
>> is it paul Davis?
>> daniel.
>> mr. Davis --
>> daniel.
>> I知 sorry, mr. Daniel. I apologize for that. I will say that I知 impressed by how forthright you are about coming and talking about how upside down your company is. That's pretty amazing. My question with you would be, first, what kind of a county policy or what is the system that we have in place that if a company that we have awarded a contract to comes along and gets bought, whatever, obviously we've got a company here that really did something that they shouldn't have done because they knew nothing about the business that they bought, which has really put us in a bind, not to say that we didn't have some problems with the preceding company. Would you answer that, number one? And then I would ask -- let me ask the question and you can answer them in this order, please. How long is it going to take to find a replacement, and do you have any will at all in the fos that you have to work with, if you say don't take that amount of time, whether it's two weeks, a month, whatever, is there any will to say, okay, well, you all see the severity of your issue. I mean, I don't -- because I知 going to bank on staff when they come to me and say this is how bad this has gotten. And when you see your backup that talks about the meetings from January all the way through to June, there obviously is an issue. I can appreciate that something obviously is being done or seems to be being done at this point. But sir, if you would mind answering -- sid, if you would mind answering a couple of those questions.
>> on the first question about assignment of contracts. When we contract with the company, the contracts say they cannot assign this contract to anyone else without formal court approval. So any time that happens, we come to Commissioners court and get approval. In this particular instance, I believe staff actually went and visited the new offices and sat down and tried to go over with staff the procedures and contractual requirement. I believe there was a willingness on both parts to try to make this work one last time. So I feel like staff has done an inordinate amount of mediating and facilitating and working with them to try to make things right. What do we do in the interim? We're looking at some of the state contracts. We've talked to txdot and we're calling some of the other contractors that submitted proposals four or five years ago. So we feel like that there are people out there that can do this work in the interim while we put out a new solicitation.
>> and starting immediately? Would that be able to take place immediately?
>> we could do that.
>> it's not a matter of taking a couple of weeks to say, on oh, whether it's with txdot or whoever it's with, you feel like that you could start Wednesday morning with somebody. Because it sounds like to me that we have a lot of daily business.
>> daily.
>> that takes place in this arena.
>> and one of the other things that some of the departments have said to me is that they can do the some of the testing is not as sophisticated as what we contracted with, the cups. They can do some of that testing in the interim also. So I don't think that we'll be without services. I do not believe we'll be without services in the interim.
>> the fact that no one else has one of these automobile sized toshiba's still is going to allow us to take care of whatever needs we have if we go with someone else.
>> yes, sir. [one moment, please, for change in captioners] I think the quality of the test results would be 100% used on these people for these people's lives and their personal lives are at stake because you could have someone end up with a positive that wasn't or vice versa, you could have somebody with a negative that wasn't. I was just going to ask that we have worked around the clock. The problems that they've encountered, I felt like we have made the necessary steps forward. Understand after five years they've had this contract, the other people they are involved with, they are just flat fed up with it. I just would ask to recognize that we've corrected our problems and we can get those results back and we can perform up to the county standards. I was going to ask if you would please allow us another probationary period, at which time if we could continue service while they look for another source, maybe they could -- maybe we could prove ourselves in the interim.
>> you posed a question as far as the tester versus their machine they have to do some of the testing and you brought up a point of being 30% less accurate. But I guess I would like to say and you mentioned earlier in this conversation that that was the only machine here in the Austin area. I don't know if that's true or not, if it's factual or not, but I would like to suggest whoever we bring on board, we do the best we can as far as getting the best type of results from the alcohol and drug testing screening. And so -- and let me show this to you, mr. Daniels, and I知 going to shut up. But we are continually looking at the performance of our contracts with Travis County, and it's very important that compliance is met when it comes to performance. And it appears that this has not met some of the standards that we are looking for as far as performance. And so this is the reason I want to support the motion that the judge just made because we have to do the performance, and that's just the way it is. So I hope you can understand that -- and I appreciate you do coming down and testifying before the Commissioners court.
>> has there been anything said this morning that would waiver your opinion with regards to how we need to act on this today?
>> Commissioner, I would have to defer to the departments that are involved in this on a daily basis. We have -- we have two people here, rosy and dan mansur. Would you all consider another probationary period? They are saying no.
>> okay.
>> I assume that r.f.p., R.f.q., Whatever we issue, they are free to submit a proposal. Then I assume we would have to take this history into consideration. But, you notice, the problem is the situation really got out of hand before the acquisition, but that business decision was annuity the county's. We simply approved a request. And to be honest, we do it all the time because there are businesses that are acquired. We just assume that the new business has read the contract and will comply and we will get the same service and pay the same compensation. And so if you have outstanding invoices that are valid, I mean, we are duty-bound to honor them. As long as they are accurate. Any more discussion? All in favor of the motion? That passes by unanimous vote. Thank you very much, mr. Daniel and staff, thank you very much. Move approval of b and that is basically for us to waive the competition, the search for this service on a temporary emergency basis until we can prepare the documents to complete.
>> second that motion.
>> any more discussion? All in favor? That passes unanimously.
>> thank you all.
Last Modified: Wednesday, July 9, 2003 5:52 AM