Catching Up: FSSA Gets Sued

Hat tip to Blue Indiana for picking up the story of a class action lawsuit filed against Governor Mitch Daniels, and FSSA Director Mitch Robb, for their handling of the contract with Liberty Health Care.  Liberty was contracted to close down the Fort Wayne State Developmental Center.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette weighed in with this:

The Indiana Court of Appeals ruled in July that the state didn’t follow proper bidding procedures required under Indiana law when it gave Liberty Healthcare a contract in May 2005 to manage the facility.

Later that year, the state and Liberty negotiated a long-term contract to fully privatize the center. It ran retroactively from Aug. 1, 2005, to the end of 2007, or 90 days after the last resident left. There was no public bidding for either contract.

That case is on appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court.

The lawsuit, filed Friday, names Gov. Mitch Daniels as a defendant and charges that employees lost their state jobs at the center when the facility was privatized illegally.

All 836 state employees were set to become employees of Liberty on Jan. 1, 2006, but more than 60 employees chose to retire – avoiding the changeover.

The remaining employees’ jobs were protected until March 31. In the meantime, 696 applied for a continuing job with Liberty and about 80 of those failed a necessary drug test or criminal background check.

That meant Liberty offered jobs to 612 employees, with 586 accepting.

The lawsuit claims that many employees lost the benefits associated with state employment, and that the contract with Liberty should be declared void.

“The Daniels administration flagrantly violated the law,” said David Warrick, executive director of AFSCME, the union representing the employees.

“Compliance with Indiana’s public bidding laws is a fundamental check on executive authority and ensures that the governor will not enter into sweetheart deals, like the multimillion-dollar contract with Liberty, without public input.”

The center has now been closed since April – something Family and Social Services Administration Secretary Mitch Roob said was the right thing to do to a facility rife with abuse and neglect violations.

“It was a dysfunctional culture. Our first and only responsibility was and is to the health and safety of the residents,” he said. “This is a pathetic stunt by AFSCME. Every single employee was offered employment with Liberty during the closure process.”

Blue Indiana comes back with this:

Perhaps I am misreading the whole situation, but it sure seems like Mitch Roob is confused about why he is being sued. It’s my understanding that there were a quite a few bad apples amongst the bunch at the FWDC, and that in a sense, the privatization effort was successful on some fronts. Sure, he can attack his own people once again and describe conditions under his control as a “dysfunctional culture,” but we already knew that Mitch Roob hates his own employees.

The issue wasn’t the closing, it was the contract. Specifically, the fact that the multi-million dollar deal wasn’t offered to anyone else. There are rules about these sort of things, and those rules were blatantly disregarded by the state when they simply handed Liberty Healthcare a big bag o’ money and told them to close things as fast and furious as they could.