Oversight panel warns Youngstown school board

By Harold Gwin

YOUNGSTOWN — The city school board can ignore the advice of the state fiscal oversight commission regarding proposals for a transportation-service contract, but doing so could jeopardize any contract the board presents for commission approval.

That warning came from Roger Nehls, chairman of the five-member Financial Planning and Supervision Commission that controls city school-district spending while Youngstown remains in state-mandated “fiscal emergency.”

The school board, seeking to cut the district’s $5 million annual student-transportation cost, came up with a request for proposals for consulting services that include placing digital video-recorder/global-positioning-system units on 60 buses as well as computer software to track bus routing, streamlining bus maintenance, streamlining transportation payroll and providing general-consulting services.

The school board sent the request for proposals to the oversight commission, but the commission voted last week to disapprove the document, saying it was too broad and needed to be narrow in scope and detail of services being sought.

The school board this week ignored that disapproval, voting 4-3 to proceed with the original request for proposals as drafted.

Board members Richard Atkinson and Jacqueline Taylor, who opposed the original version of the document before it was sent to the commission, and Shelley Murray cast the dissenting votes.

“It’s not detailed enough,” Atkinson said, proposing that contractors be allowed to bid on each of the individual components of the proposal. The board majority wants each contractor to make a single bid on the entire package.

Murray said the document needed more specificity before being put out for bids. The district should have its own software and employee training, she said.

Taylor said she believes the district needs the software to improve operations but isn’t in need of an outside consultant at this point.

Anthony Catale, Michael Murphy, Lock P. Beachum Sr. and Dominic Modarelli voted for it, saying the board business committee had been working on the document for nine months, and seeking the proposals is sound business practice. The document gives the school board the right to cancel the contract after one year if projected savings fail to materialize, they said.

Catale, board president, said Ohio law gives the commission control over spending and contracts, but this is neither. It’s only a request for proposals and isn’t binding, he said, adding that the board or the commission could reject any contract deals that emerge from it.

That’s likely to happen, Nehls said.

“We never said they couldn’t send it out. What we said was we disapproved it,” Nehls said. “I guess I’m not surprised. I am disappointed.”

The board chose not to focus on elements suggested by the commission that would have helped deal with the contractor proposals in a businesslike manner, he said.

Because the board document lacks the specificity needed to compare one bid accurately against another, the board can’t demonstrate what the best proposal might be, Nehls said, adding, school officials shouldn’t be surprised if any proposal they bring before the commission gets little attention.

gwin@vindy.com