Butler County not satisfied with 1 bidder for $10M contract

Butler County is hoping to attract a larger pool of bidders for a $10 million contract it awards for a Job and Family Services transportation duties.

Universal Transportation Systems, based in West Chester Twp., won the $9.2 million JFS contract three years ago as the only bidder. The company provides transportation to non-emergency medical appointments for the agency’s Medicaid clients. JFS Executive Director Bill Morrison said since then two other companies have expressed interest but part of problem is this is a massive undertaking for these companies.

“This is $10 million and I don’t know of any other contract that we let for $10 million that we don’t have several competitors working to actively try to get the contract. It’s just not healthy to do that,” Commissioner Don Dixon said.

“To just have one provider is probably not a good thing anyway, because you kind of don’t have any options if something goes wrong.”

UTS transports an average of 3,500 clients per day in over 250 company-owned vehicles, according to the company website. The JFS contract was based on 123,908 trips per year.

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“If you remember we had I think six years ago a different contractor that came in out of Mississippi, held the contract for about three years, bought hundreds of vehicles in order to do it and then got beat out in an RFP process, lost the contract, ended up practically giving the vehicles away,” Morrison said. “So it’s just a difficult thing because there is so much infrastructure involved in the business.”

Dixon said officials might break the contact into pieces so other companies might be able to handle some aspects of it.

UTS also has a contract with the county’s Butler County Veterans Service Commission, and that agency did break up it’s contract in 2017, mainly because of service issues with the company.

“The hours and hours waiting at the VA has gotten better,” Caroline Bier, executive director of the vet board said at the time. “But there’s other issues — not picking people up on time from their home then getting to appointments late. We still have probably at least one complaint a day, if not more.”

The board awarded a $650,000 contract to UTS to handle transportation to the Cincinnati VA Medical Center and other areas in the southern part of their service area. For $600,000 the Butler County Regional Transit Authority is transporting veterans locally and to the Dayton VA Medical Center.

The vet board will be going out to bid again early next year. Bier said “it has been good splitting it up” and problems with UTS have lessened since Geoff Kuzio bought the company and hired a dedicated customer service person.

“It’s been good to have one point of contact for those issues instead of going around and trying to engage with dispatch, that’s not really job to address issues,” she said. “So it’s been good they’ve added staff on the UTS side.”

JFS also had issues with UTS under the old management, but Morrison said those problems have largely disappeared.

“We are going to come up with some strategies that may be based in geography like the vet board or maybe based in program type,” Morrison said. “Because in addition to the contract we have for Medicaid med transportation with UTS we attach a number of other contracts to that as well, in order to get the benefit of scale.”

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Morrison said the county used UTS to transport Children Services clients to and from court and for the work experience program they had for teens this summer.

Commissioner Cindy Carpenter also asked Morrison to see what it would cost for the county to pay for pharmacy trips for the Medicaid clients they are transporting. Trips to pick up prescriptions are not Medicaid billable.

Dixon said he thinks officials need to put a task force together to brainstorm this issue.

“I would think you need to put some people together, reach out to the other counties, you need to come up with some other ideas, rather than say ‘I don’t have any options I only got one bidder.’ I don’t think that’s being a good steward of taxpayers’ dollars,” Dixon said. “I think we need to be aggressive, I think it would help in delivering the other services Commissioner Carpenter has identified. I would think you need to put some special effort behind this.”

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