Delaware County councilmen rip report on prison

MEDIA >> As members of Delaware County Council aired some of their opinions on the recently released Phoenix Management Services report that attempted to evaluate the costs between operating a prison publicly versus privately, some labeled it basically “worthless.”

Last week, the Delaware County Board of Prison Inspectors released the highly anticipated, long-awaited report that had been commissioned last year to be a comparative analysis of private and public operations of correctional facilities.

While citing annual cost savings of $1.5 million in the current model, the report also stated its findings were “severely impaired” by the inability to retrieve costs such as health care and litigation from GEO Group Inc., the private firm that operates the 1,883-prisoner facility.

“Unfortunately, the report was almost worthless,” county Councilman Brian Zidek said, noting Phoenix’s impairment admission “by GEO ultimately deciding that it would not comply with Phoenix’s requests for information.”

He continued, “So, we ended up paying $120,000 to receive a report that Phoenix couldn’t complete because of a county vendor - and remember we pay this county vendor over $4 million a month - this vendor refused to cooperate.”

When the report was released, GEO representatives said they provided as much information as they could for the report but would not release any information deemed proprietary under any circumstance. In the report, Phoenix wrote it had reached an agreement with GEO to release needed information after the contract, finished last year, was complete, but did not do so.

Zidek also noted what the report said about the $36 million labor and $49 million overall cost estimates of the county operating costs for 2018.

“The estimates shown on the prior page are for illustrative purposes only,” he read from the report. “They cannot and should not be relied upon as GEO did not provide sufficient detail for Phoenix to provide the (b)oard with a more accurate estimate.”

Zidek said he suspected that GEO did not want to reveal how much profit it makes from running the county prison.

The councilman said after he reviewed 2018 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents for GEO, he estimated that the annual profit GEO would receive for running the George W. Hill Correctional Facility would exceed $3.1 million.

“The county doesn’t need to earn a profit running our prison,” Zidek said. “So removing this profit margin would save the county over $3 million each year.”

In addition, he said he didn’t believe the corporation had $3 million in purchasing power capabilities..

County Councilman Kevin Madden also had issues with the process regarding an entity that encompasses 30 percent of the county budget.

Noting he disagreed with how Phoenix had been selected, he said he would’ve preferred that the public had input in a requests for proposal process regarding the scope of work, as was done in the county pipeline risk assessment and the countywide evaluation of public health.

“What we ended up with was a consultant that really lacked oversight,” Madden said. “We have leverage with GEO.”

He said the prison board repeatedly said the report delays were due to an inability to gather information from other counties, not from GEO. Philadelphia and Allegheny counties also failed to provide data for the report.

He said pressure could have been placed upon the company to provide the needed information as he said there is a structural “misalignment” as the prison board makes the decisions yet county council foots the bill for the facility.

County Council Chairman John McBlain said a public presentation of the report would be forthcoming.

“I both publicly and privately expressed my frustration at the pace of the delivery of the Phoenix report and what I thought Phoenix ought to do if they did not receive information,” he said.

However, McBlain added, “When we look at the substance of the report, I think it speaks loudly that both economically and from a qualitative standpoint, the Delaware County prison compared very favorably with other similarly situated county jails.”

Yet, in conjunction with the lack of information in the report, McBlain had concerns about how much the costs would be for the county to assume operations of the prison, when such costs as litigation and health care were not included.