Make Summit Pay What it Owes in Jail Staff Overtime

In Allegheny County, waiting on "reports" or "experts" is often used as an excuse to delay fines for polluters, action in the jail, or even discussion of critical issues. Much of the information we need to take action does not actually take months to figure out.

For example: Summit is the Jail's food service provider. In their contract, they're required to manage all food service activities at the Allegheny County Jail.

However, they often don't send staff, and Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) staff must instead do their job.

It's well-known that the ACJ already has a massive understaffing and overtime problem, even without Summit skirting its contractual obligations. What makes it worse is that taxpayers are paying for this overtime, which means Summit saves money every time it violates its contract. 

The solution here is simple. The Controller's office should reduce the money paid to Summit equivalent to the cost of that pay/overtime.

We don't need to wait for the entire jail staffing audit to do this. Per the contract, every Summit employee working in the Jail must be approved by the Warden. Therefore, you just need to take the list of approved employees and compare it to the entry and entrance logs of the jail. Or, if there are kitchen supervision logs, check those.

When Summit employees aren't in the jail, they obviously aren't managing food preparation, and county staff is instead doing their job for them. This is a review we should be doing on a regular basis, given Summit's notoriety for not providing personnel.

Summit’s contract expires in less than two months (April 31st), so if we want to enforce that contract by withholding payment for contract violations, we’re running out of time. Specifically, the Controller is running out of time.

The previous food service contractor, Trinity, was also frequently in violation of their contract, as proven by my Right-To-Know Law requests. That contract was also never enforced and their contract was allowed to expire without withheld payment.

This is just one example, but many contracts are likely written this way, allowing taxpayers to be charged twice while a contractor pockets that money.