Pa. requested $340 million in emergency contracts in 2020 with little oversight

The Department of Military and Veterans Affairs also requested commercial buses to transport guard members throughout the city, but that request did not include a price tag.

In October, Pennsylvania State Police submitted a $25,298 request to purchase tactical glasses ahead of the Nov. 3 election in anticipation of protests, the emergency procurement request said.

The glasses would be used to protect police against laser pointers, which had been used “as a weapon to distract and dissuade the advancement of riot control lines” and could cause officers “serious injury (including blindness),” the request said.

State police spent $25,099 on 200 pairs of the StingerHawk glasses using money from the federal Equitable Sharing Program, which is administered by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In December, the Department of Corrections asked to spend $20,000 to hire a contractor to build a new service road entrance to SCI-Mahanoy, a state prison about 50 miles southwest of Wilkes-Barre, records show.

A federal lawsuit alleges that corrections officers there used so much pepper spray on Tyrone Briggs, a 29-year-old West Philadelphia man, that they killed him. Fearing protests as the lawsuit was filed, corrections said it was urgent to build an alternative entrance to the facility for staff and deliveries.

But there weren’t any protests, according to the lawyer who represents Briggs’ family in the case, nor did he know of any that were being organized by the family or other people.

State law does not require a written contract for emergency procurements.

To find out whether the work was ever completed, and how much the project ultimately cost, Spotlight PA requested invoices from the corrections department. A corrections spokesperson confirmed that the road was constructed in January, a month after the initial request. The invoice dated the next month, on Feb. 28, shows the work cost $14,659.

It is used “on an as-needed basis,” the corrections spokesperson said, without further clarification.

Lack of transparency persists

The Insight Global contract was among the most expensive to pass through the emergency procurement process in 2020, and the proposed Public Consulting Group contract would be one of the most expensive of the 137 requests filed in the first six months of 2021.

Personal protective equipment made up a significant share of requests since the start of the pandemic.

An Associated Press report in December estimated the state spent about $110 million on plastic face shields, masks, gloves, and more from the beginning of 2020 to early summer last year. That report does not clarify how much of that spending occurred through emergency procurements, but House lawmakers held a hearing in March that focused on how state agencies used the process to acquire the gear quickly.

Department of General Services Secretary Curt Topper emphasized to lawmakers that time was of the essence during the early days of the pandemic, and that the standard solicitation process would not have been fast enough.

“That process can take weeks, and we did not have weeks to spare,” he said.

A department spokesperson later told Spotlight PA that it can take a minimum of 45 days to finalize non-emergency solicitations. About 1,200 such purchases were completed from March 2020 to March 2021.

Earlier this year, lawmakers questioned another expensive purchase: an $11.6 million contract with Boston Consulting Group, a firm hired by the health department in February using federal aid to advise the state’s vaccine task force about the struggling rollout.

At the time, lawmakers who served as members of the vaccine task force couldn’t explain how Boston Consulting Group was chosen.

“Any time you hear of $11 million of a non-bid contract that’s done in this manner, yes, that does raise eyebrows,” one of the members, Rep. Tim O’Neal (R., Washington), said.

Boston Consulting Group was hired before the task force’s first meeting and without O’Neal’s input. Still, the company’s advice improved what started as a “horrible” vaccine rollout, O’Neal said, a sentiment echoed by several other task force members.

Contract documents show the firm was hired to work on five vaccine-related objectives: data management, organization and coordination, communications, smart vaccine allocation, and grant management. Task force members said many of those goals were accomplished.

To illustrate the firm’s impact, task force members pointed to examples like downsizing the vaccine provider network from more than 700 sites to a “focused network” of 200 to 300 providers in late March, which allowed the state to allocate more doses to bigger sites capable of holding mass vaccination clinics and speed up the administration of first doses.

Beam, the acting health secretary, explained to lawmakers during a budget hearing in April that Boston Consulting Group helped the state improve communication and predictability around the distribution of vaccines, and ultimately provide more vaccinations.

“That’s a dollar a Pennsylvanian that we would be asking to try and get us on the other side of the pandemic,” she said. “And that is an investment that we believe is very worthy of each of the dollars spent.”

During the same hearing, Sen. Michele Brooks (R, Mercer), who chairs the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, said she saw the value in the company’s work, but questioned the high price tag and urged agency officials to keep in mind that the funding, “whether it’s state or federal, it’s all taxpayer money.”

“I’m not sure the $11.6 million was needed,” Brooks said. “Maybe on a more scaled-down version.”

Spotlight PA is an independent, non-partisan newsroom powered by The Philadelphia Inquirer in partnership with PennLive/The Patriot-News, TribLIVE/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and WITF Public Media.