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These staffing contracts, and the people who oversee them, need a much closer look

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* From a July 28, 2023 memo to IEMA Division of Operations staff sent by Acting Chief of Operations Mike McPeek…

The purpose of this memorandum is to update the Division on recent staffing changes and provide operational guidance to mitigate disruption to our operation. Effective today, 28 July, Chief of Operations, Marc Sullivan, Deputy Director of Emergency Management, Scott Swinford, and Legislative Liaison, Jen March, tendered their resignations and are no longer employed by the agency. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to each of them for their sacrificial service and contributions during their tenures. Each of them was instrumental in advancing both our division and our agency while serving the State during numerous historic response and recovery efforts.

* IEMA’s response to my questions, including if the resignations had anything to do with staffing contracts, including one (click here) with Favorite Staffing…

These were three distinct resignations due to unique circumstances and we can’t comment further on individual personnel matters.

IEMA, like agencies across state government, engaged in a variety of staffing contracts to respond to the unprecedented emergency brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. As these contracts continue to wind down the state is completing all federally required review processes to ensure federal funds were used properly. These resignations were not related to those processes.

* Lauren FitzPatrick at the Sun-Times kept digging. This is from August…

Records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, however, show that chief of operations Marc M. Sullivan was forced out July 28 “in lieu of termination for misconduct.” His boss, Scott Swinford, also stepped down the same day as deputy director, second in command to agency director Alicia Tate-Nadeau, using an oddly identical letter citing personal reasons to resign.

The records show Sullivan wrote a second letter to Tate-Nadeau asking for “a copy of the investigation findings that drove me into administrative leave, as well as my last evaluations so that I may use those to understand my shortcomings and reference accomplishments for future employment searches.” […]

The liaison, Jennifer March, also was pushed out July 27, according to documents that say she “resigned in lieu of termination due to poor performance.” […]

Documents signed by Tate-Nadeau show March and Sullivan are barred from working for IEMA again.

Interesting. Three of Director Tate-Nadeau’s very top people were initially praised by IEMA, but two of them were barred from ever working there again? Swinford and Sullivan had worked with Tate-Nadeau when she was a brigadier general in the Illinois National Guard. March worked for Tate-Nadeau at Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications for years. Tate-Nadeau is still running IEMA.

* FitzPatrick today…

Illinois taxpayers have been paying $28,000 to $48,000 a month for the executive assistant to the Illinois Emergency Management Agency’s director.

Between February and August, the assistant accounted for $240,761.30 in billings — double the salary of her boss, Alicia Tate-Nadeau, during that period. […]

In response to questions about the costs, IEMA spokesman Kevin Sur said the contractor, Amy Gentry, resigned effective Thursday and that a state employee hired as the director’s assistant but “temporarily assigned” elsewhere would return to her former $84,000-a-year post Friday.

Gentry has recently been paid $156 an hour through a set of massive contracts earmarked for Illinois’ COVID-19 response. Her total billings to IEMA in other contracting roles through August top $1.03 million.

Timesheets show Gentry billed her time — as many as 350 hours a month — as “director support, Springfield/Remote,” or “Executive Assistant to the Director (Springfield/Remote), though invoices to the state define her pay rate and position as “Planner-IDPH” to “assist Illinois Department of Public Health on planning efforts.” […]

“It is because of Amy’s extensive knowledge on multiple Gubernatorial Disaster Proclamations that we were able to address multiple issues/declared disasters and serve our agency and the people of Illinois,” Sur said. “Amy’s hours logged with our agency are reflective of her work, which have spanned multiple disasters.” […]

Gentry has been employed by All Hands Consulting, a subcontractor to Innovative Emergency Management that was hired by IEMA in 2020 as one of the firms aiding Illinois’ pandemic response, including testing sites and vaccination clinics. […]

Gentry’s highest billing month was March 2022 — $60,055.42 for 350 hours at $171.22 an hour as an “Ops Chief Assistant,” “developing state to local vaccine operation plan.”

She logged 350 hours again in January 2023 as a “Planner-IDPH” for $156 an hour, or a little less than $55,000. IEMA won’t release those timesheets.

So, if Gentry was so good, why did she quit?

Also, Elizabeth Findley served as Tate-Nadeau’s private secretary, but she was ousted in August, according to the Sun-Times…

“Elizabeth Findley’s last day was August 22, 2023,” reads an auto-reply from her state email. “Please direct all inquiries to Amy Gentry amy.gentry@illinois.gov.”

Hmm.

Do you get the feeling that you can’t trust anything IEMA is saying?

* Let’s move on to a Tribune story from last week…

When a security guard clocked out of a Streeterville migrant shelter one Friday in March, he’d just logged his 84th hour at work that week.

His bosses told the city it was at least his 56th day in a row working a 12-hour shift, according to invoices they filed with the city — invoices whose sizable overtime helped contribute to tens of millions in city payments to the firm staffing the city’s migrant shelters.

The security guard was employed by Favorite Healthcare Staffing, a national employment firm that has become the city’s biggest contractor to handle the growing migrant crisis. Under the deal, the city hired the firm to provide case workers, security guards, janitors and many other employees for the migrant shelters — at initial base rates ranging from $60 to $150 an hour.

Invoices reviewed by the Tribune show that hundreds of Favorite Staffing workers logged 84-hour workweeks — with the overtime, paid at a 50% premium, helping balloon bills that topped at least $56 million. At a Woodlawn shelter in early February, for example, two-thirds of the 50 staffers logged working at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week. At the Streeterville site one week in March, roughly 8 in 10 workers logged the same hours. […]

A former aide to Mayor Lori Lightfoot described the amount of hours billed as “not surprising” given the scope and urgency of the services, while Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s spokeswoman defended the payments as a frustrating byproduct of a nationwide worker shortage at a time staffers are most needed to help open and run shelters.

“A humanitarian crisis that requires 24/7 staff at multiple sites throughout the city unfortunately will result in staff working overtime,” Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said in a written response to questions.

This is definitely a crisis requiring lots of staff working long hours amidst a national worker shortage. The question is if the people are actually putting in all those hours.

* Tribune today…

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration has renewed a controversial contract with the out-of-state company that staffs the city’s migrant shelters despite its significant overtime billing, a move his team said was its only option as efforts to replace the costly firm with cheaper, local alternatives have hit snags.

Favorite Healthcare Staffing and the city on Monday signed a $40 million extension through October 2024. It’s Johnson’s third extension for the firm and empowers the company to continue hiring caseworkers, security guards, janitors and other employees for the roughly two dozen migrant shelters housing thousands of Chicago’s asylum-seekers. […]

“If we were to kill the contract, who would staff these spaces?” Pacione-Zayas said during a briefing with reporters. “We would get slammed and critiqued on that. And so we’re being responsible while trying to come up with new ways to be responsive and also sensitive to the fact that the city of Chicago is paying for this.”

A recent Tribune investigation found that the city has paid out extensive volumes of overtime as part of its original deal with Favorite Staffing. A small selection of invoices provided by the city following a Tribune request for all of Favorite Staffing’s invoices shows hundreds of Favorite Staffing workers logged working 84 hours a week — with a majority of that time being paid at an overtime rate at a 50% premium. […]

Pacione-Zayas said Thursday that doing away with Favorite Staffing is easier said than done, but the administration plans to announce new staffing contracts for some of its 25 shelters in mid-November. Favorite Staffing, though, will continue working at more than half those shelters due to lack of interested bidders and other procurement restraints, she said.

* Gov. JB Pritzker was asked yesterday whether he thought the Favorite Staffing contract should undergo a performance audit and whether the state was going to look at its own contract with the company…

Again, it’s up to the city to manage their contract because it’s a direct contract with the city that gets negotiated. We have a general contract, essentially under which they’re able to do it. And I’d just remind you that the point of these contracts, because there are lots of folks who provide individual services that you could go find, it’s very hard to have a contract with someone who can on-the-spot in an emergency be able to deliver the kinds of things that these companies are able to do. And so that is an expensive thing. We’ve got to keep people from taking other jobs while they’re waiting for an emergency to occur somewhere. And in this case, it would be for the city of Chicago. So obviously, we you know, everybody should be keeping track of you know, the expenditures that they’re making. But I just want to remind the folks who are paying attention to these contracts that having a long term, you know, emergency-related contract is an expensive endeavor. That’s actually why they’re so hard to get

Please pardon all transcription errors.

Asked if people were doing good work if they were working 12-hour days for 56 days straight taking care of people, Pritzker said…

No, but again, of course, I understand what you’re asking me. I don’t, my answer’s not no. My answer is that emergencies are what you think they are right? They occur. You don’t know how many hours you’re going to have to apply. You don’t know how many people that are available to do the work that’s necessary. And so sometimes overtime is absolutely necessary. We’ve seen that in all kinds of things throughout the pandemic. So, you know, if there were more people available, I think we all know there’s a labor shortage in the country. And so if there are more people that are available, the prices, costs come down.

Again, there is no doubt that the country has a worker shortage. There’s also no doubt that emergency situations require people to put in long hours. The question here and with the IEMA contract is whether people are actually putting in the work. And considering how IEMA’s stories keep shifting, it’s a legit question.

Hopefully, the internal IEMA rumors about an ongoing investigation by the Office of Executive Inspector General are true and somebody will get to the bottom of this.

posted by Rich Miller
Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 11:17 am

Comments

=== The question here and with the IEMA contract is whether people are actually putting in the work. ===

I think it is legitimate to ask whether the staffing agency is making every effort to try to hire the additional staff, or whether they prefer to pad their contract with overtime to that it pads their administrative overhead charges.

At the end of the day, if hiring the necessary number of workers is not something that the staffing agency is capable of doing, why do they have the contract?

As an aside, I bet there are a lot of alderman and community leaders wondering why they aren’t receiving the postings for these jobs that pay $60/hr or roughly $120K a year.

Comment by Thomas Paine Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 11:33 am
=== if hiring the necessary number of workers is not something that the staffing agency is capable of doing, why do they have the contract?===

Because nobody can actually do that?

There’s so much to this post, but you want to go off on a tangent. Stick to the topic at hand.

Comment by Rich Miller Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 11:35 am
IEMA is obviously very good and very capable about many things but my personal experience with them was they are simply not fiscally savvy in any fashion. It’s like monopoly for them and it’s all funny money. They have it, they spend it.

Anyway, I really appreciate this story and the questions you are asking.

Comment by Lurker Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 11:44 am
I get what you’re saying but until the city can actually handle what is going on on the 5th floor, they should just hand over the keys to other people to do the real work on the stuff they can’t handle. Probably cheaper to overpay this company than wait for the lawsuits against the city because of how badly they would screw that up.

The City can revoke the contract but they already decided they won’t. They could audit them but they can’t even staff their press room what are the chances they have enough employees to do audits?

Comment by Frida's boss Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 11:49 am
I hope this helps inform the ongoing (never-ending?) efforts to improve procurement laws. It’s really hard for new companies to become vendors for government. Way, way too hard. So the few that figure it out leave officials that are scrambling with very few options. I’m really sympathetic to officials who face straight up emergency situations and have very few tools in the procurement box with which to turn.

The red tape to work for government is overwhelming.

Comment by Dan Johnson Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 12:05 pm
IEMA is, and has been for years, an overly top heavy bureaucracy. And as with most bureaucracies, their main objective is to grow and maintain the bureaucracy. By installing people who’s function is only to have meetings, and push paper, they maintain it well.

Over the years I have worked with IEMA more times than I wanted to. Going back to 2011, I thought every one of them should have been fired. After 2019, I was down to only thinking that of half of them. IEMA has actually impaired and slowed down Emergency Response during disasters due to their insistence that each one of their bureaucrats gets to stamp the paperwork, so they can have a meeting about it and say see what I did.
I will say that things did improve with the new Director, but she needs to clean out the rest of the house.

Also, with reports like these, it helps to explain IEMA reducing funding to local EMA’s and their attempts to choke them out altogether.

Comment by SOIL M Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 12:10 pm
@DJ- I see what you’re saying but who created the procurement rules? They do this to themselves

Comment by Frida's boss Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 12:11 pm
=== Because nobody can actually do that? ===

I just looked on Glassdoor.

1) The company has 42 healthcare jobs posted in the Chicago area;
2) None of them appear to be in Chicago’s migrant shelters;
3) most of the health care jobs they are advertising appear to pay substantially less that what they are billing Chicago.

Maybe there is a reasonable explanation. But I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question to ask. Lousy contract oversight usually involves not just cost overruns, but lousy contract management and lousy procurement.

Comment by Thomas Paine Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 12:30 pm
I read this article last week and immediately became skeptical. 84 hour work weeks for seven weeks straight and no one thought this might be ‘padded’ or call Favorite Healthcare Staffing to hire more people?

I get there’s a national worker shortage but jeez, hundreds were lining up to work at the Romeoville Amazon warehouse three months ago.

Comment by Jocko Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 12:40 pm
Bottom line 4 people have been fired or resigned at IEMA. Director is still employed and ultimately she will be held responsible. I am not suggesting anything inappropriate was done but this was likely federal dollars opening the door for a thorough federal review.

Comment by Henry Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 1:02 pm
@Jocko: These positions might need higher qualifications than an Amazon warehouse.

I wondered if the payment calculations included overtime — did they actually work 12 hours a day, or did they work ten hours, but two were at double time?

Comment by Socially DIstant Watcher Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 1:03 pm
The Mayor’s Office could have spent the veto session working with the General Assembly and Governor to receive more emergency procurement authority. Instead, they did what they did. This is a failure of planning and motivation from leadership, not a paperwork problem.

Comment by Three Dimensional Checkers Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 1:14 pm
One of the first lessons I got when I started as a state employee many decades ago: my supervisor (who had come to the state from prior law firm practice before) was constantly griping about red tape and arbitrary restrictions in various laws related to hiring and contracting that were justified for “ethics” reasons.

Her main argument was that bad actors would keep acting badly no matter how many additional restrictions you put out there. In the end, the restrictions just made it harder for the average employee or manager to do their jobs efficiently, while the bad actors would keep being bad.

The more time passes, the more I’m inclined to agree with her. Adding more revolving door restrictions, or making for more formalized hiring processes just makes the hiring process more of a chore for the average employee and manager. Meanwhile the corruption keeps happening unabated.

We need a culture change across state and local government when it comes to enforcement. Putting more feel good restrictions that only impact the people who were already following the other laws won’t help.

Comment by Homebody Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 1:16 pm
===These positions might need higher qualifications than an Amazon warehouse.===

Um, yeah. Please think before you post.

Comment by Rich Miller Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 1:17 pm
@Frida’s boss, the General Assembly passed the law, the then-Governor vetoed (or AV’d it), and the GA overrode the veto.

They’re not the ones that need to abide by the procurement code.

Comment by Juice Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 1:41 pm
This feels like a case of seriously padded billing. Not sure how that is a procurement issue and not a management issue. The operational and fiscal people would have to see this and should have questioned it. The investigation of this is overdue… or is not being disclosed. Why not?

Comment by Lincoln Lad Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 1:50 pm
==Please think before you post.==

I don’t deny some of the roles are specialized…but the trib article quoted a security guard.

Comment by Jocko Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 2:17 pm
bet that “worker shortage” might have been ameliorated if they knew they could clock 84 hours a week with kind shakey oversight. Very entertaining

Comment by Annonin' Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 3:29 pm
=== the trib article quoted a security guard. ===

And included custodians in the contract too.

Has anyone asked SEIU if they have any members that would like to make $60 an hour on the side?

Or the FOP?

Or the Nurses Association?

Maybe the problem is that Chicago hired the largest staffing company in the country instead of a cadre of local problem solvers.

Again, this appears it could be a procurement issue.

Comment by Thomas Paine Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 3:46 pm
So much of this is on the administration, its personnel, and oversight to work.

The details to all that are the story, but the chapter and verse are the simple governing principles…

Comment by Oswego Willy Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 4:05 pm
=== but the chapter and verse are the simple governing principles… ===

You think the Governor’s office would have learned their lesson when the Director of Veterans Affairs was literally not showing up to work.

I am curious about what those self reported 350 hour work weeks look like. I suspect it looks a bit like a felony right now. Hope she has good evidence to support those 16 hour days she claimed she was working.

Comment by Candy Dogood Friday, Oct 27, 23 @ 4:54 pm
This is probably why IEMA reduced the amount of federal EMPG grant funds to the accredited counties and municipalities by about 1 million dollars for the new grant cycle.

Comment by Silent No More Monday, Nov 13, 23 @ 8:44 pm