Whenever I see a no-bid deal involving any local government body, I start questioning the process.
From today’s Dayton Daily News:
Dayton International Airport is requesting City Commission approval to pay a company up to $36,000 over three months to recommend a new telephone system at the airport.
The commission will be asked today to approve the contract with JYG Innovations LLC, which will not supply the new system.
The Clayton company is to assess what is needed for an upgrade to a voice-over-Internet-protocol phone system and to help the city shape plans for the new system, according to documents prepared for city commissioners.
Last week, the Commission approved a three-year contract with the same company, paying it up to $90,000 annually for a three-year total of $270,000, to provide information technology and support services to the airport. That includes IT systems engineering, design, implementation, security monitoring and problem-solving.
The city did not seek competitive bids for either contract, instead opting to directly hire JYG under “professional services agreements,” said Stanley Earley, Dayton’s deputy city manager.
The company, which was registered with the Ohio secretary of state in 2009, is certified as a minority-owned, female-owned and small business enterprise in Dayton’s procurement program, according to city documents.
Dayton hired JYG because it has expertise suitable for these contract needs and its personnel have worked with the city and know its systems, Earley said. Dayton would seek competitive bids for larger contracts, he said.
What’s even more fun is that JYG Innovations LLC is calling itself a minority-owned company and apparently getting bonus points for it. What about other minority-owned companies? Shouldn’t they get a chance to bid as well? (The City of Dayton does not consider Veteran or Service Disabled Veteran Owned Businesses worthy of special consideration, despite the Feds having a 3% SDVOB contracting mandate).
I went to look up the registration of the website- and find they registered www.jyginnovations.com [2] by proxy- to hide the registrants’ info. Luckily, they list their CCR registration on the site and their CAGE code 5X0W5 – where I find thanks to the SBA site [3]:
Jacqueline Gamblin
JACQUELINE GAMBLIN 180 FIVEPINES CT CLAYTON, OH 45315-9657 IT Consulting services focused on IT Strategic Planning, Business Process Improvement, Business Intelligence and Information Security.
Then I go to LinkedIn- where I find I have connections to her through 4 people, including Pete Hager who is ourchasing manager for the city. She worked for Ingenium [4] from 1997 to 2009 before starting JYG Innovations with her last title VP [5].
She has a BS in Biology from WSU earned in 1990
Ingenium seems to be one of those huge companies that small businesses like to call a “Beltway bandit” with HQ in Maryland and primarily be involved in government contracting [6]. They have a local office in Dayton.
Her maiden name is Yokley and she graduated from Wayne HS in 1985 (that answers why it’s JYG)
Manta [7] tells us she has a staff of 1 and annual revenues (before the no-bid contracts) of under $100,000 a year.
Her PTAC page- (PTAC is a government paid-for operation to help small businesses do business with the government) is almost blank: http://www.ptacconnect.org/company/view.asp?iLookupCompanyID=10593 [8]
She is the chair for “Involvement Advocacy” [9] in Dayton- which is a group started by Peter Benkendorf (with whom I grew up in Cleveland Heights) to support the arts- and his Blue Sky Project [10] among other things.
I’m not able to connect the dots to why she got this contract without having to bid- or allowing others to have an opportunity to bid, but I’m pretty sure one of my readers will make the connection before the day is done.
For an IT professional, the idea of hiding your domain registration by proxy is stupid. Incredibly so. It’s for that reason I kept digging and finding and pursuing this. The Internet has no hiding places.
It’s unfortunate that the DDN missed the bigger no-bid contract last week. Miss Gamblin just got a $102,000 a year job, without having to be hired- or going through an open-hiring process. The contract which was approved last week- actually started on Nov. 1, 2011 according to the non-ADA compliant posting of the meeting agenda http://www.daytonohio.gov/cco/Commission%20Agendas/2011/11-16-11%20Agenda.pdf [11]
Apparently, this is the hiring of an independent contractor to work on site- and possibly subcontract two other positions via her company. There is no indication if she is to hire onshore for those other positions (she could be hiring someone in India to do her server admin or security work if my quick read of the contract is correct).
This is not the way an honest, open government operates.
I am unable to decipher from her website her history of expertise in this specific project, or a track record of doing this kind of work solo. The firm is less than 2 years old and lists zero clients, or references.
Please enlighten me, this looks like hiring someone’s lover to a sweet paycheck with zero oversight.
additional info:
Here is the contract scope on the $270K work from the city agenda- note the original spec included VOIP services:
- Consultant will perform the following work and services for the City’s Department of Aviation:
- Perform server system administration and operations.
- Monitor data backup processes.
- Maintain desktop computer systems.
- Assist users with problem resolution.
- Monitor network availability and operational status.
- Monitor system security posture including antivirus signatures, system patches, Pix
- firewall rules, and ISA server.
- Manage user add, remove, and changes in Active Directory.
- Provide IT systems design and implementation guidance.
- Communicate status of project activities and actions with the Airport IT staff.
- Infuse new technologies into the environment as requested.
- Provide final-tier problem resolution services as requested.
- Assist with VOIP implementation.
Consultant shall assign one of its Programmers to provide on-site (at the Airport) support and off-site (remote) monitoring support to provide the Professional Services up to a maximum of twenty (20) hours per week during the term of this Agreement. In addition, Consultant shall provide Application Engineer, Senior Systems Engineer and Systems Engineer labor categories to provide Professional Services on an as needed basis and upon the verbal or written preapproval from the City’s Director of Aviation or his designee.
If you want to look at the whole agenda in an ADA compliant form (unfortunately- the OCR reoriented the internal links) I’ve done the OCR for you: 11-16-11 City Of Dayton Agenda ADA compliant [12]
I don’t understand this because I can tell you that previous IT work for much smaller bids did go to RFP and was bid on by at least 4 companies all local to Dayton. Plus, I don’t understand the purpose of this handout. Do you have a 100mb network in place? yes? Then you are suitable for VoIP. That’ll be 36 thousand dollars please…
I can think of at least 4 companies in the very business incubaors that Dayton itself owns that specialize in Computer Networking and IT Services. Let alone all the companies that are located within City limits or even in the area who are more qualified. I’m guessing at least one or two of them would have loved the opportunity to bid.
They changed the article. Now they are saying the City did get competitive bids and JYG was selected as the winner.
Good catch, Steve. There’s quite a difference between
and
I wonder what John Nolan, the DDN staff writer credited with writing this article, has to say about the change. Is Nolan guilty of sloppy reporting (twisting Earley’s words about competitive bids to make it seem that the city “did not seek competitive bids”)?
So who wants to do the FOIA request for all bids submitted- and to see who was asked to bid?
Do I have to do all the work- or do we have a volunteer?
@David Lauri, sloppy reporting is one thing, but to have originally included the statement that this company was hired “under professional service agreements”, suggests he didn’t just make something up. My money says that after it was posted here at esrati.com, Nolan got a phone call to, ummm, clarify the details !!
“On Wednesday, city officials corrected erroneous data they had given Tuesday about technology services for Dayton International Airport.
Two contracts awarded to a Clayton company in the past two weeks were competitively bid, rather than directly awarded as city officials first said.
City documents show at least six companies bid on the more recent phone service contract, which was awarded to JYG Innovations.”
Good catch, David Sparks. Those paragraphs about the airport contract are buried at the bottom of the article to which you linked, “Area police face most ‘challenging year’ with small staff.” This sentence that you quoted
is interesting because of the phrase “at least six companies.” At least six? They don’t know exactly how many? This should be a very easy number. Seven companies bid, or eight companies bid, or 12 companies bid on the contract.
David Esrati, I will submit a request for public records to try to get the information on which companies bid on this contract. At least the city’s website has a decent page explaining how to submit public information requests,
So lets think about this for a minute. Lets just say the airport has 3000 phone lines. Switching them all over to VoIP would be a significant savings. But wait, 98% of those phone lines belong to renters; airlines, car rental and food vendors. Does the city resell phone service to all the renters at the airport or are we actually talking about probably 50 city owned phone lines being switched over to VoIP which would be the airport director’s office, airport security and maintenance? I don’t know the answer to that question but I ask if all the vendors buy their phone service from the city. If we have 50 city owned phone lines on Centrex the annual cost is about $9000. Realistically we could expect 60% savings after installing $10,000 equipment and increasing the bandwith service. Using annual savings of $5400 + $10000 equipment + $36000 up front consulting fee the first dime saved will be in realized in year 2023 for these 50 phone lines. Bend over folks!
All above are correct and thanks to David and David and David for shining the light on this issue. Yes, the DDN printed a “Correction” and retraction on Thursday,
SO WHAT?
Once again, how many bidders were there? Where was the RFP? Thanks David Esrati for the due diligence – it was a well written expose’ … and keep digging for the truth! MAYBE the Cox machine and their i-Team “reporters” will investigate? Somebody else can drop a dime on the Airport bidding sham…this is a blatant award to an apparent cronie company shell game?
David E. answers his own question:
I’m not able to connect the dots to why she got this contract without having to bid- or allowing others to have an opportunity to bid, but I’m pretty sure one of my readers will make the connection before the day is done.
Please enlighten me, this looks like hiring someone’s lover to a sweet paycheck with zero oversight.
Folks from City of Dayton have been very responsive on clearing this up for me. I think what may have happened is the original 270k over 3 years contract to provide general IT services was bid on by 7 compaines (not sure where “at least 6” came from) and JYG won that original RFP. The VoIP analysis was part of that larger award. Thus they originally quoted the Asst City Manager as saying the VoIP part was not solicited because it was part of a bigger general IT services contract already awarded. At the risk of having the deal look underhanded, they corrected the article to show that the contract was in fact bid on. Municipalities generally do not disclose other companies proposals or bids for confidentiality reasons (that is typical) so we may never know who the other 6 who did not win are. Regardless of existing or non-existing qualifications of JYG (the person or the company) it would have been nice if the contract would have been awarded to a company who has a “job creation strategy” of some sort. It doesn’t seem like JYG exists for any purpose other than doing this work for the airport.
corrupt businesses and corrupt governments
Actually I am met the CEO JYG Innovations. Jackie is a good business women. I have personally met her at few defense contracting events. She is outstanding! I would let her work on my business IT problems at anytime.
@ Henry, that has nothing to do with the unfair Airport deal that was handed out to JYG Innovations. The company had no background in providing such services and not to mention lack od job growth in this area. There are many bottom feeders like JYG who just exist to take $40K deals just to “suggest” a plan.
Steve, I think a person’s character can be judge of how they operate business wise. I did check with the city because we (my firm) was looking at similar opportunities at the same time. Jackie just happens to know the right people around the town. It has less to do with her background or her company and more to do with her relationships with those people. As the author put it, JYG Innovations is a beltway bandit but for Dayton (city work and government work). Can someone else shed some light on this?
This is not the way an honest, open government operates. – See more at: http://esrati.com/no-bid-to-a-no-name-company-dayton-airport-deal-suspicious/7630/#sthash.FKguScC7.dpuf
This is not the way an honest, open government operates. – See more at: http://esrati.com/no-bid-to-a-no-name-company-dayton-airport-deal-suspicious/7630/#sthash.FKguScC7.dpuf
This company is no longer around, they have tanked.
Brilliant. So if this company is no longer around, who will support the phone system??
Bob VL
P.S Jacquelin Y. Gamblin was still around in September 2013 to do this interview:
http://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/news/2013/09/16/jackie-gamblin-ceo-of-jyg.html?page=all
@ Pink Jacquelin Gamblin an JYG Innovations is still standing strong. It’s interesting you eat from the plates of others, but not prepare your own. Trust but verify your information before you make assumptions.
Apparently they have a website now- http://jyginnovations.com/
Companies like these will always be around as long as government takes money from poor people and give out city contracts without competing. I just saw their new website and read information on Dayton Business Journal about this Jackie Gamblin person. There is certainly lots of credibility their when a medical school drop out is running an IT company? And then can’t figure out a way compete in the real market without government funding “Commercial opportunities have been tougher to find” so let me go smooch the weak government officials.
The Dayton International Airport contract was the prime example of this incompetent company getting something they couldn’t win in the commercial sector. I just looked at their page, they don’t do any telephone system work yet the outcome was: “Dayton International Airport is requesting City Commission approval to pay a company up to $36,000 over three months to recommend a new telephone system at the airport.”
Are you seriously kidding me?