Homeless contracting blunder leads to new oversight of county’s Human Services department
The Pierce County Council seems to be increasing its oversight on the Human Services Department after a blunder that nearly caused the collapse of a system that serves as the county’s “front door” to homelessness response.
At the beginning of September, Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier was forced to declare a state of emergency to maintain the functionality of the Coordinated Entry system.
The county’s contracts with organizations that comprise Coordinated Entry were set to expire at the end of August with no renewal in place, calling into question how the Human Services Department allowed the lapse to occur.
The council approved a summer supplemental budget re-appropriating homelessness service funding on Sept. 10. Before the vote it amended a long-standing budget rule that exempted Human Services from having to provide notice to the council ahead of contracting services.
Council member Marty Campbell brought forward the amendment.
“Frustrating, because we had been asking all along where we were at with many of these Human Services contracts,” Campbell said as he introduced the amendment during the Sept. 10 meeting. “We weren’t getting back the feedback or the answers we wanted, and then we find out that not only was there a problem, but it has risen to the level of a major emergency.”
Paul Bocchi, a legislative analyst for the council, told the council that a provision had existed for “well over a decade” requiring the executive to notify the council of any contract or contract modification valued at more than $250,000 at least 21 days before it is signed. Human Services was exempt from that rule, likely due to the high volume of contracting done by the department.
“The Human Services department does a lot of contracting, as you well know, they are involved in a lot of different activities, they receive a lot of outside money from the federal and state governments,” Bocchi told the council on Sept. 10.
“I don’t know why we didn’t think that Human Services should have the same accountability that Public Works that every other department in the county is held to,” Campbell said.
He said that his amendment would create an “even playing field” and allows the council to track contracts and be aware when there are delays in contracting like what occurred with Coordinated Entry.
The council approved a performance audit on “efficiency and effectiveness” of the Human Services department’s contracting process in November 2023, scheduled to be completed by the end of 2024.
The amendment also mandates training for Human Services staff on contracting and procurement procedures and laws. Additionally it appropriates $150,000 for Human Services to implement the recommendations from an upcoming audit.
“When something like this happens, in any organization, and you have a major breakdown in procedures like that you kind of give a full stop and say, ‘Let’s make sure we know what happened,’ and what we should be doing to make sure we don’t have it happen again,” Campbell told the council.
Council Member Ryan Mello said the council received feedback from organizations contracted by Human Services for homeless services who have “repeatedly” run into challenges procuring contracts for their work.
“It takes months if not well over a year to do basic contracting,” he told The News Tribune. “That is unacceptable.”
During the Sept. 10 meeting, council member Dave Morell asked if requiring council notice for Human Services contracts would further delay the process.
“It really is about whether or not they have done their planning,” council chief of staff Julie Murray answered. “It really is a question of how Human Services is really planning out their activities. We’ve seen several funding awards come to council on the same day in which service is expected to be delivered.”
Council member Amy Cruver was the only on the council to oppose the amendment. During the meeting, she characterized the new requirements on Human Services as “micro-managing.”
“I would have liked to have the department up here to explain things,” Cruver said on Sept. 10. “Because I sit back and wonder if they are particularity overburdened. Because we have done, over the last three years, an immense amount of growth in the Human Services department with the new taxes at the federal level and at the local level.”
Human Services director Heather Moss told The News Tribune the department is not overburdened or attempting to do more work than its bandwidth would allow.
“While our budget has grown in size and complexity over the past 5 years, our program and administrative staff levels have been increased so we can keep up with the larger workload,” Moss said in an email to The News Tribune.
Moss blamed the lapse of the Coordinated Entry contracts on an “administrative oversight.”
“A competitive procurement we completed during the pandemic did not have sufficient authority to allow contract renewals once the pandemic ended. It was a simple oversight that staff missed this limitation, and our finance department caught it at a late enough date that our only option was to establish a short-term, narrow declaration of emergency to allow us to write 4-month contracts that would keep coordinated entry operating while we conduct a new procurement,” she stated in an email to The News Tribune.
This story was originally published September 13, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
