Travis County Commssioners Court
December 23, 2003
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Item 18
18, discuss and take appropriate action on contract with consultant to assist with jail operations analysis and recommendations.
>> good morning.
>> couple weeks ago we came from front of the Commissioners court and discussed the scope of work that the evaluation committee was negotiating with the contractor or proposed contractor. And what you have today is a final draft of the contract. It includes that scope of work. A couple of things to note on -- as far as changes government I think you were given a memo updating on the fact that the vendor instead of going through their for profit institute wanted to go through their nonprofit fo reasons of revenue. And also there were some just slight modifications to the scope of work we presented to you a couple weeks ago and that was wording that kind of further defines and tightens up the responsibilities of the couldn't ant versus our responsibilities. And again, just because of the nature of the scope of work because it's so integrated, it's very important to have clear delineation of exactly what their response it's were as far as deliverables, as far as information provided to the county and what our responsibilities for internal teams were going to be in getting information to the consultant to allow them to do the work and do the final product together.
>> questions, comments?
>> we already did the budget transfer last week, correct?
>> yes.
>> it's ready to go.
>> let me ask one question. The language that gives the language purchasing [indiscernible] authority to modify the contract, in an amount of up to $25,000, I know that is a a major construction contracts, but have we hadhat in a personal services contract in the past?
>> I have not seen it in there, judge.
>> this is just a slip of the pen or --
>> I believe so, yeah.
>> then my recommendation would be to take it out because I really think on this contract especially, if there are modifications that a court needs to verify and respond. This appears in two or three places. I would think if we just deleted that, li on that one on, page 15, if we handed it and its discretion must approve the change, period, if we just strike the other three lines, I don't think the meaning would be changed at all and the consultant is not impacted one way or the other. Certainly the consultant is not thinking of a $25,000 increase at this point.
>> I certainly hope not.
>> I second that.
>> my motion would be to approve the contract with that change and wherever places it appears, I know it appears at least twice. The other thing is if we -- even after all of our collective efforts do not believe we're moving in the right direction, the court needs to know if this is win where we can change course in mid-stream if we need to. I mean we're all expecting miraculous -- mirror miraculous results, but if it looks like those are not forthcoming, I would think we would look at it. The other things that it does require is that we do a whole lot of work in-house in order to -- the consultant to do their work or there would be a team working with us. Right?
>> right.
>> any more discussion?
>> yes, sir. Michael, do you support going forth with this 100%? Do you think this is -- the reason I’m continuing to ask you that is knowing whether you came -- where you came from and as a matter of fact probably might have even been a bidder for some of this work or the company you were with. Is this -- would you feel more comfortable if you had more time to look at this and evaluate -- for some reason I get the impression you are trying to read the court on the direction that we're wanting to go, and I’m uncomfortable with that. I mean, I would rather you be in a position where you say if I had my druthers, I would rather look at this thing and give you my honest opinion whether the scope is right and whether this is something that I think if we get this information that I’m going to come to you and say you know, I agree with this and I’m going to do I my vote is going to hinge on you doing this thing because you are the professional in this. I can't even ask you the intelligent questions about this much less, you know, get in and second guess whether or not this is something we ought to be doing. The things that do frighten the heck out of me is when you get into parts of this, I mean because you really have operations and you have facilities. And what's scares me to death is we're going have a consultant come in and tell us, you know what? You don't have adequate facilities. Oh, great. So in other words, we've got to go out and convince the public that we are going to take on another sizable capital project. And I don't -- I mean, I don't know that we could do that in this community. I mean -- but -- and we all know that, you know, that operations, you are right, is somewhat integrally involved with the facilities themselves. It's not like somebody can say, hey, here's the problem that you have operationally, but by the way, you have 37 billions that you've got to do something with or incorporate or somehow find a way to do this. So let me shut up and get you to answer my question.
>> okay. Well, that's true, I mean i've been on a couple of months and hi to get up to speed on where the county was in its progress in looking at this contract and what they were trying to accomplish. Based on the work of the evaluation committee and I think they've done an exceptional job and I say that professionally and from my own speaker suspect I have, an exceptional job trying to work out ain't grated scope with the vendor based on the amount of resources that were available. I will say that I do think that we can get some good value and benefit from doing this study. I think it's structured in such a way where the onus is on us from a project management perspective, and I take that response bit because my department is going to be the project manager to use them as a resource throughout this project. We've already had internal discussions about meeting weekly to coordinate, make sure all the teams are making adequate progress, and also to get any questions and concerns in front of the consultant as we need to. I expect to be touching base with them on a very frequent and regular basis to do that. So I think we can get the benefit that we're seeking to achieve with this scope and the way it's structured, but I will footnote that also with some of the concerns that I brought up last time which are some of the tradeoffs here is that there's a lot of handing off of information, and i'll be honest, that's a concern that I have just because I have not typically seen a lot of scopes of work structured in this way. But I think that being said, sometimes you are going to look for a consultant to do a lot of these pieces in and of themselves and you will oversee it internally to make sure they are going to be producing the results you want to see. But the way it's structured to have their support throughout a lot of the parts that we're going to be doing especially, I think we can still get some of that value, again, the onus is on us to utilize them, utilize their expertise, their help desk as it's stated in the scope, and I think we can get some good results from this. [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
>> any more comments, institutions move approval.
>> second.
>> with the changes we made a few minutes ago. Any nor discussion in all in favor say aye? That passes by unanimous vote. Thank you all very much. We appreciate your work on the committee.
>> yes, thank u
Last Modified: Wednesday, December 24, 2003 7:26 AM