Teed Off Over Golf Carts

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Politics of the ugliest variety trumped public process of the highest order on Sept. 4 when the Los Angeles City Council voted to reject the Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners’ award of a long-term contract to Ready Golf Centers to manage and maintain golf carts on the city’s seven regulation golf courses.

Lobbyists, political operatives and family connections carried the day over rational business analysis, reasoned discourse and objectivity. And in the process, a lot more was lost than the simple endurance of substandard, dangerous golf cart service. Public integrity was lost.

You don’t have to be a golfer to be appalled by that. What should have been a routine matter deteriorated into something more reminiscent of the workings of a banana republic than that of the nation’s second largest city – six years, three failed bid processes, thousands of staff hours, $250,000 of taxpayer money, and still no simple contract to provide the most basic of public golf services.

The city’s Recreation and Parks Department did everything right in this case. Upon receipt of the authority to develop the bid documents, it developed a specific procedure with time lines for the entire process. And it adhered to that published procedure from start to finish.

The development of the evaluation criteria was performed in the most public of manners – first at multiple meetings of the Golf Advisory Committee, followed by a public hearing of the Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners. All other aspects of the bid documents, including time lines and specific evaluation processes, were similarly vetted in public.

Public access

The complete bid package was placed on the parks department’s Web site for the whole world to view. Every respondent not only had an equal opportunity to participate in the public processes employed to develop the document, every respondent had equal and full knowledge of precisely how its response would be evaluated – a knowledge that included the fact that the parks department would retain an independent consultant to recruit five respected and experienced persons from the golf industry to perform the final evaluations.

That consultant, Economics Research Associates, was among the most respected and experienced in the field, having performed a great deal of prior municipal golf work for the city’s parks department, the county’s parks department, Los Angeles World Airports and numerous local cities. The five-member evaluation panel assembled by Economics Research Associates was packed with substantive and experienced persons with decades of experience in municipal golf contracting.

The consultant and its panel performed according to the processes and evaluation criteria adopted at these public meetings. They read and analyzed the proposals, interviewed the prospective proposers, and applied what they learned to the publicly adopted evaluation criteria. They published their results in a public document, and that document was vetted by parks department staff and debated at two public meetings of the Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners.

Finally, the city’s Chief Administrative Office performed not one but two analyses of the results of all of the above and recommended to the City Council that the parks board’s award be sustained.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, by a one-vote margin, the City Council sent a powerful signal to all sectors of the business community, not just the golf sector, that you don’t secure business with the city of Los Angeles by prevailing in such open, fair and substantive public processes; you hire the most and best connected City Hall lobbyists and invest your money in their $600-an-hour services.

And then everyone rubs their heads and wonders why earlier this year when the city of Ventura put out a request for proposals for a lease to manage two of its municipal golf courses, it received nine responses, many from such nationally respected firms as Kemper Sports, Billy Casper Co. and Courseco, while companies of such stature just don’t seem to be interested in the city of Los Angeles. Businesses tend to avoid doing business with banana republics.

Given the closeness of the result, just maybe the Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners will send its award, one sustained at every juncture in this open public process, back to the City Council and give that body a chance for redemption.

Craig Kessler is executive director of the Public Links Golf Association of Southern California.

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