Armando Vazquez
By Armando Vazquez & Deborah De Vries / Guest contributors
As the executive director of the KEYS leadership Academy @ Café on A, I have for at least the last 13 years come before you. Sometimes it is once a year, in certain years on multiple occasions; that is when the County of Ventura is again awarding the Boys and Girls Club of Oxnard and Port Hueneme, and Path Point with yet another multi-year, multi-million dollar contract or contract extension for youth services programming. I have challenged the equity, the logic and fairness of the process.
I have pleaded before you, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, as well as other high ranking county officials that administer the awarding of these funds, to look into the biased, prejudicial, unfair and rigged sole sourcing policy and practice that the County of Ventura has developed with these two multi-million dollar organizations. The County of Ventura, has conspicuously and without hesitation continuously enriched these two “big box” organizations over the last decade to the tune of millions of dollars in this monopolistic scheme that is, fiscally irresponsible, ethically reprehensible and we believe illegal.
I agree that I make for a pathetic sight before you, powerless and impotent. It is possible that you may see me as the ever present sore loser, the loathsome whiner, the out of touch malcontent, the bush leaguer who has no game and is incompetent and cannot compete with the big girls and boys. Right behind us are the hundreds of small CIBO’s of Ventura that been ostracized and also labeled incapable of meeting the capricious RFP standards of the county, and we have excluded completely out of the funding awards process.
But the indisputable facts are that the KEYS Leadership Academy @ Café on A in Oxnard has for the great part of two decades provided restorative and life altering love, friendship, long term best practices programming and services to the most at risk youth and their families in the grater Oxnard area. Of this truth there can be no dispute.
I am not here to recite the KEYS Leadership Academy accomplishments. I am here to tell you that you have a grave and severely flawed protocol of evaluation, selection, and awarding of contracts with respect to youth services contracts for the County of Ventura, and specifically how that fatally flawed RFP process is currently conducted to the detriment of hundreds of other CBO’s in the county that are routinely shutout completely from receiving funds. The biggest and most tragic consequence of this reprehensible monopolistic relationship between the county and the BGCOP and Path Point is that the most acutely at risk and troubled youth and their families have also been shut out and have not received services from the two “big box” agencies.
I have pathetically flopped around in the dark for the past 13 years seeking documentation, information, dialogue with respect to how the county of Ventura conducts its evaluation protocol for RFP’s for youth services. Every Ventura County department that issues RPF’s for youth services programs whether it is WIB, Probation, HSA, GSA or any other county department that I have spoken to invokes county privilege to secrecy, silence and intransigence when asked about the RFP evaluation protocol.
The RPF evaluation protocol has been kept a county secret, I have been told repeatedly to protect the evaluators and thereby keep the evaluation process neutral and objective, this was the one and only reason that the evaluation protocol was kept secretive and not open for scrutiny and review by the public. Today, it is obvious that the invocation of secrecy by some county officials was nothing more than a cover up for incompetence, and perhaps negligent conduct.
It was not until the KEYS Leadership Academy @ Café on A proposal for providing Evening Reporting Center (RFP # 5656) services to youth on probation was rejected and the tentative contract award given again to the BGCOP, that we filed a formal protest with GSA. In filing this formal protest we were for the first time given a glance at the incredibly flawed, arbitrary, and capricious RFP protocol that the county operates to evaluate and award tens of millions of dollars in contacts to CBO’s in Ventura County.
What we have discovered is that the County of Ventura RFP design and evaluation process is nothing more than a popularity contest masquerading around as an objective, empirical and scientific process. This horrifically flawed RFP design and evaluation protocol is nothing more than a blatant monopolistic paradigm that has been promulgated to benefit the BGCOP and Path Point. The tragedy in the County of Ventura is that for more than a decade tens of millions of dollars have been misdirected to benefit only two politically connected “big box” agency that have well placed county friends and political muscle that they flex to monopolize the RPF process when it comes to youth services.
This monopoly creates a horrific disparity and imbalance of services and programs which exacerbates the limitation of desperately need services and programming to the most needy and at risk youth in their families in the Oxnard area and throughout the greater Ventura county region. Supervisors it is time to end this monopoly, our most at risk and needy youth deserve better!
On Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at your next scheduled board meeting, all five of you Ventura County Supervisors can correct this historical injustice of funding only “big box” agencies. Supervisors it is time to do the right thing!
— Armando Vazquez and Deborad De Vries are co-executive director of The KEYS Leadership Academy@ Café on A in Oxnard.