Sunrise is criticized for mismanagement

Broward inspector general finds ‘gross mismanagement’

SUNRISE – Staff at the city of Sunrise “engaged in gross mismanagement” when they deliberately allowed a contractor to overcharge and added non-existing positions to the contract, according to the Broward Office of the Inspector General.

The inspector general determined that the city paid, from July 2012 to September 2017, about $226,872 over the original amount agreed to in the contract with Albion Staffing Solutions. That was 36% of the $636,839.01 that the city paid to Albion in total.

Albion is a staffing agency that provided the city with temporary administrative and clerical personnel between 2012 and 2018. If a job was open at City Hall, the city could either hire a full-time employee or fill the permanent position with a temporary worker. If they chose a temporary worker, the city used its temporary services provider to provide a candidate to fill

the position.

Staff failed to pay Albion the rates the agency had bid in the first place “and allowed Albion to simply charge higher rates,” shift workers into higher-paying position titles without increasing their duties, and created “new position titles to evade rates in the contract” when existing, lowerpaying positions in the contract applied, according to the investigation.

According to the inspector general, the city’s staff didn’t tell the City Commission that the city had overpaid on the contract. “After the commission approved a 5% increase of the contracted rates, staff and Albion continued to go around them,” according to the investigation.

The city has ended its contract with Albion and has selected a new vendor to provide temporary personnel services, among other changes. The ethics czar also had a warning for county government and the other cities in Broward “because the city of Fort Lauderdale found in 2015 that its staff engaged in similar methods to circumvent that city’s agreed rates with Albion” about keeping watch.

“The OIG urges those local governments to carefully review their temporary staffing rates to ensure that the prices they agreed to pay are the prices they are paying,” according to a statement from the office.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel couldn’t reach Miami-based Albion Staffing Solutions Inc. for comment. But the company spoke to the investigator, who reported: “Albion, through its president, denied that it colluded with the city in any way or that it was guilty of any fraud or bad practices. Yet, the OIG did not make any finding on either of these issues and in fact specified that we did not find that Albion engaged in misconduct as the Broward charter defines the term. What we did find was that Albion charged rates higher than those that were in the contract and that the city allowed it.”

A spokeswoman for the city pointed to City Manager Richard Salamon’s written response:

“To state that the OIG’s investigation substantiated ‘gross mismanagement’ on the part of city staff in its administration of the Albion contract does a disservice to the city of Sunrise and its dedicated employees,” Salamon wrote in part to the inspector general, and fails to mention the issues are “matters of interpretation.”

His office did not respond to queries about whether the staff involved have been counseled.

One employee, according to the investigation, who was involved in making up new classifications “said it seemed like she was saying she messed up, but it was not done with malicious intent.”

“The OIG urges those local governments to carefully review their temporary staffing rates to ensure that the prices they agreed to pay are the prices they are paying.”

— Inspector general’s report