Sarasota's $130,000 catering bill contrasts sharply with Manatee County's $9,000 deal through the Salvation Army

SARASOTA COUNTY — While residents hunkered down at home during Hurricane Irma or fled the state and storm, Sarasota County employees and first responders dined on Mattison's catering.

For almost four days at the county's Emergency Operations Center near Interstate 75, about 400 employees stayed behind to operate the county's emergency hotline, coordinate 911 dispatch and eventually help clear roads, restore sewer lift stations and help residents return after Irma passed.

To keep those employees fed, the county executed an emergency, no-bid contract with the catering arm of the upscale casual restaurant group of Chef Paul Mattison, according to county documents.

Under the $130,000 deal, several Mattison's staff members prepared and delivered enough food to serve up to 5,000 meals from lunch on the Saturday before the storm hit through lunch the following Tuesday — a cost of $26 per person, per meal, according to the purchase order issued the Friday before the storm hit.

Meals ranged from eggs and fresh fruit at breakfast to boxed lunch sandwiches to options like hot dogs, burgers and chicken Parmesan for hot meals, county officials and the purchase order said.

But that fee stands in sharp contrast to what Manatee County provided to its about 400 first responders.

Manatee served similar types of frozen dinners and basic meals, from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to chicken, lasagna, meatballs, bread sticks and hamburgers.

But those supplies were ordered in bulk through the Salvation Army for only a fraction of the cost — just a little more than $9,000 total for roughly the same number of people and meals, according to the invoice for Manatee County’s purchases.

That's less than Sarasota paid for any single line item it purchased from Mattison's.

Sarasota County Commission Chairman Paul Caragiulo visited the emergency operations center to deliver video updates as the storm approached, though he did not stay at the center itself. He saw food but never ate a meal there.

Caragiulo said he was shocked when told of the final price by a reporter last week.

"I'm flabbergasted," he said. "We need some review of this process to say the least, because, wow. With all due respect, that's an awful lot of money for that service."

Sarasota County administrators defend the purchase as a necessary aspect of the larger commission-approved disaster response plan. Securing catering was not only for county staff, but as a standby to establish larger feeding kitchens for an army of first responders had Irma actually made landfall here as some forecasts predicted ahead of the storm.

The area fortunately avoided the destruction that would have followed, though, and ultimately did not need to activate the remainder of its catering plan, they said last week.

The $130,000 tab also is only a fraction of the more $10 million all of the county agencies already have spent on storm response in the two weeks since Irma passed, according to initial estimates. Although the county pays upfront for these costs, the food contract ultimately will be 100 percent reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency aid.

“It’s easy to focus on the EOC aspect, but we’ve really got to focus on the disaster response part of the contract that we didn’t use,” county communications director Donn Patchen said. “The EOC is a piece of a big puzzle. If we would’ve gotten hit by a Cat 4, we would have used the whole puzzle.”

Backup plan

Mattison's catering was not Sarasota County's initial plan for covering food service during the storm.

Instead, it was a backup plan put together in a pinch days before Irma's arrival following the termination of the county's previous disaster catering contract earlier this summer with another upscale restaurant.

The county tries to keep a formal catering contractor on standby to provide emergency food service for the operations center during a storm and to lead so-called "base camp" services, through which the company would be expected to provide all of the equipment and staff needed to set up mobile kitchens and tents for responders or even residents in the event of a truly devastating natural disaster, Emergency Services Director Rich Collins said.

That contract was last bid in late 2015 and the county formally awarded it to the catering arm of the St. Armands restaurant Cafe L'Europe in August 2016, according to county documents.

But in June, some of the catering service split from the restaurant and notified the county it would no longer be able to provide the entire scope of the contract if called upon, Collins said.

"The person who could handle the base stuff parted ways with the group, so our concern was that we could not be able to get the service we needed when we needed it," he said. "We made the decision to cancel the contract and go back out (to bid again), but then obviously Irma decided to visit."

As the track of Irma shifted and put Sarasota in its sights, the county called on the previous contract anyway in search of help, only to find the group already had left to set up relief efforts in Texas after Hurricane Harvey, Collins said. They suggested Mattison's as a backup that could provide both food to staff and the potential extended base camp services, should Irma cause as much damage as was being forecast that Friday.

Under the county’s state of emergency declaration, which allows officials to suspend typical contract bidding rules, the county called only Mattison’s to secure the group ahead of the looming storm, Collins said. Repeated attempts to reach Mattison over the past week were unsuccessful.

The formal purchase order details $20 boxed lunches, $35 hot dinners and $80 packages of three daily meals — all including utensils and drinks.

Although it might sound expensive, Collins noted those prices also include the labor to make so much food on short notice and the freezer truck it was loaded onto and delivered to the emergency operations center.

The total $130,000 price tag also matches what the county would have paid the Cafe L'Europe caterers, Collins and Patchen said.

Unit prices for the meals themselves were lower in the since-canceled agreement with Cafe L'Europe and would have totaled about $105,500, based on a comparison of the order and the previous fee structures.

But the previous contract also charged separately for the truck, any snacks, beverages and the "fourth meal" for those staff members working the overnight shifts during storm response — which would have tacked on at least another $25,000 depending on exactly how it would have been charged.

“We were very specific with our procurement folks not to stray from the prices we would have paid already,” Collins said.

But that still raises questions about the how the county handles that contract in the first place, said Caragiulo, who voted along with the rest of the commission to approve that arrangement in 2016.

If the contractor does not ultimately set up an entire mobile kitchen or basecamp and simply uses the EOC facilities, it potentially should be treated as a separate fee or even contract rather than a full disaster response, he offered.

"It's just that the services that were provided are in conflict with what was written on the page," he said.

Why catering

The reason Sarasota County insists on hiring a large catering company to help coordinate disaster feeding is specifically for what it ultimately did not do following Hurricane Irma.

Although there are many catering companies throughout the area that could feed county staff at the EOC, very few have the capacity or equipment to set up and operate those emergency basecamps that could feed or potentially house thousands of first responders or even some residents if a major hurricane made landfall here, Collins said.

Mattison’s can help manage those things — as it did for some Florida Power & Light camps on the east coast after Irma — and on the day the county hired the group, forecasts suggested a very real possibility they would need to, Collins said. State officials had made overtures that they could call for such a camp at Interstate 75 and State Road 72 if necessary, though the need never materialized, he said.

"Thankfully following the storm, we didn’t have to enact that, but that’s why we do that catering service,” he said. “It’s not just for our EOC, it’s for all of the operations ... It’s more logistical.

"Imagine trying to feed in Monroe County right now for emergency workers that are actively working or just post-storm,” Collins said. “They (at Mattison’s) have the capacity to bring in the tents, the chairs, everything you need to be able to feed in the field.”

The bulk of the county’s disaster feeding contract revolves around these basecamp services, detailing a range setups from relatively basic mobile kitchens to elaborate big-top tent cities that could provide cots, showers, restrooms, offices and generators for up to 3,000 people, according to the contract terminated earlier this year.

Proving a company can coordinate so many services in the aftermath of a storm made the previous bidding process a complicated effort that took more than three months just to vet and a total of nine months before the final contract with Cafe L’Europe was formally approved, Collins said and county documents show.

With a termination date for the Cafe L’Europe contract in mid-July, county staff began re-evaluating the criteria for those basecamp services to try to decide whether they should change or whether the county should simply re-bid the same terms, Collins said.

They had not picked what to do six weeks later when Hurricane Irma began barreling toward Florida. An expedited version of the procurement over the summer, outside a formal state of emergency, could have jeopardized whether FEMA would reimburse the county for the food service and potentially multimillion-dollar basecamp services, he said.

Manatee comparison

In Manatee County, emergency management officials do not have a standing contract with a caterer for any basecamp services.

They instead rely on the Salvation Army to order food for the staff during the storm and help coordinate disaster feeding afterward, Manatee County Emergency Management Chief Sherilyn Burris said. Visitors and convention bureau staff also are expected to help and served meals during the storm two weeks ago.

"The Salvation Army does provide disaster feeding that we use, so we don't contract with a caterer," she said. "It's always something we've explored but not necessarily arranged because it could be cost prohibitive, especially for something we hope we may never need."

Sarasota County also worked with the Salvation Army to arrange for some limited food in the days leading up to the storm, but officials stand by their decision to secure catering after.

Essentially, the catering contract comes down to preparing for the worst and hoping for the best, county officials suggested.

A fast-food sandwich chain or one of the major grocery store companies could potentially have provided at least some of the food for county staff, and perhaps for cheaper, Patchen and Collins said. But it’s unlikely either could have provided 5,000 meals on a day’s notice before closing their own shops before the storm, and neither were available for aid during or after.

“When did Starbucks close? Wednesday,” Collins said. “When did restaurants close? Thursday and Friday. When did Publix close? Saturday.

“We fed through the Salvation Army up until the point we knew we were locking down and had to make those moves based on a potential Cat 4 storm,” he continued. “Everything we were doing is predicated on we don’t know what this is going to look like when the winds subside. We may need to have basecamps ... that’s why we went that way.

“If you knew Publix could be open and provide that, that’d be great. But then looking at providing that post-storm, with no power or major damage, we are very blessed this storm just happened to move to the right when it was going left.”

Procurement past

This summer, Sarasota County received its third-straight "Achievement of Excellence in Procurement" award from the National Procurement Institute.

But the recognition follows a long climb from a scandal that embroiled the department in 2011 after a former projects manager was arrested and charged with accepting $15,000 in kickbacks from a company with a county contract.

Outside investigators called the department among the worst in the nation at the time, identifying hundreds of problems in the procurement process, but the review spawned a slew of changes to county contract bidding and new oversight in the department.

Former County Commissioner Christine Robinson was on the commission when they approved the Cafe L'Europe contract but now chalks up that contract as a learning experience after being told of the Irma price tag. She was hawkish about county finances on the board and is moreso off it as the head of the Argus Foundation.

In 2015 and 2016, the commission questioned emergency officials about the development of the contract and understood it in the context of the larger disaster response, not only at the EOC, she said. She suggested the commission review the plan and Caragiulo's suggestion as part of an overall review of all of the county response to the hurricane.

"I'm certainly not going to criticize the county for food when you've got thousands of people in shelters and people literally living at the EOC trying to manage a difficult situation," Robinson said. "Looking at it after the fact is a really easy thing to do. I hope the commission takes a whole workshop to go over all the intricate operations that were occurring and what went right and what went wrong and analyzes that contract."