LOLCATS Indeed

What a freakin’ disaster. You should really take the time to click on the link to read Rebekah Allen’s superior Advocate article on this most recent Capital Area Transit System (CATS) disaster. For those not keeping score, the CATS Board plans to hire a management team to implement the promised reforms tied to the recently passed, currently disputed CATS property tax. If the process for arriving at a final recommendation for what company should serve as that management team is any guide, this isn’t going to end well.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m friends with a few of the directors on the CATS Board. Hell, I’ll be related to one by marriage in about a month. It shouldn’t impair my objectivity, but I wanted to point out my connections in the interest of proper disclosure.

For those who TLDR’d the linked article above, here is my highly condensed version: Isaiah Marshall, the CATS Board President, established a (at one time) secret committee of six evaluators (consisting of four CATS Board members, one CATS staff member, and an at-large member of the community) to score the four companies who applied for the gig: MV Transportation, SJB Group, URS Corporation, and Veolia Transportation. Of the four, SJB Group, the only local firm, has the least (read: practically no) experience in transportation management; based on their website, they primarily appear to be an engineering firm. At the end of the day, SJB received the highest score. So how did a firm with almost no experience beat out a few Goliaths of the transportation industry? Three words: the Russian Judge.

For those not familiar with the term, the Russian Judge refers to the perceived (by Americans, at least) practice of Soviet/Russian Olympic judges giving American competitors undeserved low scores in competitions with scoring discretion (e.g. ice skating and gymnastics) during and after the Cold War. So how does the term come into play here? SJB Group didn’t particularly run away with the competition. Out of 600 points, the company scored 468. The next highest score was Veolia Transportation with a score of 464. A 4-point difference on a 600 point scale is less than a 1% swing. The reason why this distinction is so important is that one of the evaluators, identified as community member (or Comrade, if I can continue the allusion) Jason Wilson, gave scores of 0 in some of the categories to three of the four applicants. Guess who didn’t receive any 0s? SJB Group, of course. More importantly, it doesn’t appear that handing out 0s was a common occurrence for any of the other five evaluators (they don’t appear to have given any). Because of that, the 0s assigned by Wilson had an outsized impact on the final score tally.

Some folks seem to be making hay over the fact that one SJB Group employee, Sidni Lloyd-Shorter, was involved with the Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Transportation, Together Baton Rouge, and also works for a non-profit affiliated with Rev. Raymond Jetson, a CATS tax supporter. I’m not really prepared to go down the rabbit hole on this one yet. Until I can spot a nexus between (Comrade) Wilson and Lloyd-Shorter, I’m not really sure one has anything to do with the other. Instead, it seems like a pretty typical public/private sector interaction. I imagine SJB Group wanted to get in on the business and hired someone who they thought might have influence or insight (basically the public-private sector revolving door we’ve come to know and despise). Whether real or imagined influence had anything to do with the outcome of the scoring related to this deal seems undefined at this point.

Based on the scores, the evaluation committee submitted SJB Group to the CATS management committee. They, in turn, endorsed the recommendation 3-1 and have submitted it for consideration to the full CATS Board. My hope is that someone on the CATS Board is going to point out how bad this all looks before a final vote is taken.

Seriously guys, it looks bad. The fact that there apparently wasn’t a process to eliminate obvious outlier scores given a small six-person sample size is problematic at best. While it appears the normal CATS evaluation procedure would have addressed this concern, it wasn’t used for some reason. After all, this is probably only THE MOST IMPORTANT EVALUATION CATS HAS CONDUCTED IN YEARS IF NOT DECADES. CATS Board, in case you haven’t noticed, citizens are currently highly suspect of the government. For the sake of the last shreds of goodwill you have in the community, please consider reviewing these evaluations in light of best practices and consider a rescore.

ADDENDUM: Naturally, there are no winners in this deal. Let’s say CATS decided to reject (Comrade) Wilson’s scores outright. In all likelihood, Veolia Transportation would win the contract. If that happens, someone is going to point out this and start complaining about cronyism: