Orange County supervisors on Tuesday approved a do-over on the process of hiring ambulance service providers, overturning a decision by the Health Care Agency director to junk a batch of requests for proposals.
County attorneys warned officials that starting the process all over again would present legal issues, so the supervisors opted instead to recruit a new panel of experts to pick ambulance companies from a batch of RFPs instead of seeking new bids.
Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer said it wouldn’t be fair to let the ambulance companies submit new bids because they would be able to look at what their competitors submitted in the first round of RFPs and adjust their new proposals accordingly.
County officials had recommended “starting from scratch,” but Spitzer led the effort to keep the original RFPs, which are under protest by some ambulance providers because the process was considered tainted.
“I think there was a panelist trying to skew the outcome” on which companies would be hired for emergency transport to hospitals, Spitzer told City News Service. “I think there was a plant, if you will, among the panelists. The scoring presented such an outlier statistically that it couldn’t withstand scrutiny.”
Health Care Agency Director Mark Refowitz recently tossed all of the bids, but the board voted 3-0, with Supervisor John Moorlach abstaining, to rescind that order.
Supervisor Lisa Bartlett suggested eliminating any of the original members of a panel evaluating and scoring the RFP in favor of a new set of experts to review the bids. Bartlett also recommended letting the new panel get a chance to ask questions of the bidders about their proposals.
Bartlett also convinced her fellow supervisors to go along with putting city representatives on the panel reviewing the bids, which would quell complaints from some quarters that cities weren’t being represented in the hiring of ambulance companies in five zones. The city representatives, however, would not be allowed to vote on contracts for service affecting the towns in which they reside or work.
“This is a way to put it back to square one while protecting the sanctity of the original process,” Spitzer said after today’s board meeting.
— City News Service