Jails getting new food service provider
But there was no violence at the juvenile jail on Airport Road. Hernandez works there as a cook and was cutting into an 8-pound package of ground beef for tacos she planned to serve for lunch.
“You do it with care and love, even though it’s not for your family,” Hernandez said in Spanish.
While the love and care Hernandez pours into her work doesn’t cost anything extra, the county is spending about $1.4 million annually to feed the detainees and employees at the juvenile jail as well as at the much larger adult correctional facility off N.M. 14. The average daily population at the adult jail is 500. At the juvenile detention facility it’s about 10 a day.
Santa Fe County Manager Katherine Miller executed a fouryear, $5.6 million food services contract Monday with Trinity Services Group, a Florida-based contractor dedicated to the corrections industry, after the County Commission signed off on the deal a week earlier.
The 25-page service agreement with Trinity, which is replacing South Dakota-based Summit Food Service, is chock-full of specifics to deal with a population of people accused of various — and sometimes heinous — crimes.
Summit was awarded the previous food services contract, which could not exceed $4 million. A separate contractor, Keefe Group, handled commissary services at the jails under a contract that was not to exceed $1.2 million. The new contract with Trinity for both food and commissary services could prove a little more expensive.
“Trinity’s contract, recently approved by the [County Commission], is not to exceed $5.6 million,” county spokeswoman Carmelina Hart said in an email last week.
Documents show the county received only two responses to a request for proposals for the food services contract, one from Trinity and the other from Summit. An evaluation committee gave Trinity a score of 1,855 compared to Summit’s score of 1,407.
The proposals were scored on ranged of criteria, from the company’s demonstrated record of integrity and business ethics to its experience in a juvenile setting at a jail.
“The committee was impressed with Trinity’s proposal, as [it] felt it was well presented, organized and gave a very good representation of the services they were proposing,” Michelle Marmion, county procurement specialist senior, wrote in a memo to Procurement Manager Bill Taylor.
“The contractor will be performing work in a detention facility and shall therefore be subject to the rules, regulations, directives and bulletins of the facility,” according to a separate five-page exhibit covering a long list of security requirements. “Under certain circumstances, the contractor’s staff and vehicles may be subject to search while on the premises.”
The agreement includes a 45-day transition period between the current and new contractor.
Other highlights of the contract:
Trinity’s employees must undergo criminal background checks “because the services will be provided in a secure facility for inmates and residents, for which the county is responsible.”
No more than 15 percent of meals served can include sandwiches.
Food must be “visibly pleasing” and include condiments, such as mustard and ketchup, “where indicated.”
Trinity will provide at no additional cost “religious or medical diets conforming to special religious or physician-ordered specifications.”
In addition to providing three meals a day of “comparable nutritional value and quantity,” Trinity will serve an evening snack after 7 p.m. The meals must be “wholesome” and “healthy” with a caloric content of 3,200 calories per day for adults and 2,800 calories for juveniles.
Trinity must prepare at least five special meals, called “spirit lifters,” on holidays including Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day, and “one meal to be scheduled at the discretion of the facility administrator.”
According to the contract, the cost of each meal depends on the number of inmates being served each month. For example, at the juvenile jail, formally called the Youth Development Program, the cost per meal for a youth population the size of Santa Fe County’s is $5.93. At the adult correctional facility, which has more inmates, the cost is closer to $1.83 per meal.
Melodie Montoya-Wiuff, a senior shift supervisor at the juvenile jail, said making sure inmates receive a healthy meal is part of a larger mission to provide them “meaningful care.”
“We’re taking care of people,” she said. “It’s not like back in the day. They don’t just put them somewhere and all you get is bread and water. We don’t do that. It’s meaningful interaction, healthy care — everything.”
Montoya-Wiuff said the juvenile inmates, referred to as residents by jail staff, eat everything that is served to them most of the time.
“We have kids — some of them, they don’t have food at home — they don’t get three meals a day so some of them actually enjoy coming here because they get three meals a day, they get a snack, they get a warm bed,” she said. “We rarely have any complaints about the food.”
Though her interaction with juvenile inmates is limited, Hernandez, the cook, also said they tend to leave a clean tray behind. Hernandez keeps a colorful homemade card in her office from an inmate who wrote in Spanish, “Thank you for making us food every day. We are very appreciative.”
On a recent Friday, Hernandez served the juvenile inmates cereal, potatoes and eggs, salsa, fruit, milk and juice for breakfast. Tacos were on the menu for lunch, and she planned to make pizza for dinner.
“They really like the enchiladas,” she said in Spanish. “They eat almost everything. It’s rare for them to leave anything on the plate.”