In a stunning snafu, the city’s child-welfare agency has rescinded more than $600 million worth of contracts awarded to nonprofit agencies in April — causing havoc among groups that serve more than 40,000 children, The Post has learned.
City officials, claiming that the scoring of contract proposals was bungled, will go back and re-evaluate all the bids. In the meantime, agency leaders who thought they lost the city contracts have to rehire workers and resume services for several months.
Some began laying off staff — only to be informed last Wednesday in urgent e-mails and phone calls from the Administration for Children’s Services that all contracts were being extended until the scores could be retabulated over the next several months.
“There was a technical error in the grading of the proposals,” the ACS said in a statement. “As a result, we are going to regrade the proposals so that they are scored as stated in the RFP [request for proposals].”
ACS officials said the scoring error involved not giving enough weight to the applicant agencies’ ties to their boroughs and communities.
They insisted the decision to rescore had nothing to do with a lawsuit by Little Flower Children and Family Services, an 80-year-old organization that was the only foster-care provider bounced when the awards were made three months ago.
It is rare for an agency to rescore a contract after it has been awarded, and sources could not recall anything near the magnitude of the ACS repeat.
Jim Purcell, CEO of the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies, said his members have been left reeling by developments.
Before the reversal by the ACS, eight agencies providing general preventive services were told they would be losing their contracts, along with Little Flower.
“Some programs closed,” said Purcell. “Now they’re being asked, ‘Couldn’t you re-open them?’ No one knows what to do, and there are no answers. I’ve been in [the field of] juvenile justice and foster care for 40 years. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
There were 15,866 children in foster care as of April and another 30,000 receiving preventive services.
“It’s kind of weird,” said one source tied to a child welfare agency.ACS officials said they launched the new 700-page-long RFPs in 2009 because the child-welfare agencies had been operating under contract extensions for nine years.