Fried took only way out in Broward food fight
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried has upheld a decision by her staff to award an emergency food assistance grant in Broward to Farm Share of Homestead, which edged out its rival, Pembroke Park’s Feeding South Florida, the leading hunger relief provider in South Florida for more than three decades.
Fried, a Democratic candidate for governor, made the right decision, but she really had no other choice.
After an extensive staff-level side-byside review of both firms’ applications, Farm Share initially prevailed with a total point score of 140.2 to Feeding South Florida’s 138.8. The apparent losing vendor cried foul and accused Fried’s staff of scoring irregularities, detailed on the firm’s website. A closer review of the two applications shows gaps in Feeding South Florida’s proposal that were highlighted by Fried’s assistants during a meeting with the Sun Sentinel.
In extending a federally funded program known as TEFAP (The Emergency Food Assistance Program), five staffers working independently of each other, evaluated both vendors in six specific areas such as personnel, experience and distribution. The Sun Sentinel has repeatedly requested the names of those staffers and the agency has declined to provide them.
Under the agency’s scoring system, an excellent grade was worth 25 to 30 points. What gave rise to a flurry of complaints by Feeding South Florida was that Fried’s evaluators gave the company excellent grades but deducted points, often without detailed explanation.
Another team of five staff members discussed the grades with the Sun Sentinel for 90 minutes and provided copies of extensive documents that led to the grant decision. The documents show that Feeding South Florida lost crucial points because of flawed responses.
Fried’s staff said Feeding South Florida did not provide a complete reply to a question of whether any agents, subcontractors or independent contractors employed anyone with a criminal record; did not list amounts and types of all community partnerships; and did not fully describe all of its efforts to reach visually impaired customers. As for the deducted points, Fried’s staff said it’s no different than a teacher who gives a student an A, and the numerical grade can be 90 to 100.
Fried aggressively criticizes Gov. Ron DeSantis for cronyism and political favoritism. That’s fair game, but if Fried had reversed her staff ’s decision, she would have opened herself to similar charges because many leading Broward Democrats, including members of Congress, state legislators and county commissioners, protested the Farm Share award and urged Fried to change the result. She announced her decision in a letter last Friday to Broward Mayor Steve Geller.
Geller called Fried’s decision “incorrect,” and said Feeding South Florida has stronger ties and greater local “depth” at relieving hunger. He also said he has “nothing against” Farm Share.
For Fried, a reversal also would have been a morale-killing embarrassment to career public servants in the agriculture department, when there is no credible evidence of bias in the evaluations. Some numerical scores look subjective and arbitrary, but Feeding South Florida’s application could have been better.
Fried must have known this was not her finest hour. That would explain why she announced her decision in a Friday afternoon “news dump,” a slack time in the news cycle when, last week, all public and media attention were focused on the horrific condo building collapse in Surfside.