Avery Building at the Round Rock Higher Education Center (Macuser1112/Wikimedia)

The Texas State University’s student newspaper The Star reports that the Round Rock Higher Education campus has outsourced its facilities and custodial services. Outside companies’ employees, The Star reported, do not have to go through the process of becoming state employees, and the employers can “hire and fire employees without dealing with state paperwork.”

In addition to outsourcing custodial staff, university officials are considering outsourcing parking facilities operations, too.

Texas State has contracted with Chartwells for its foodservice, which also handles staffing for university’s partnerships with companies like Starbucks, Chick-fil-A and Panda Express.

According to its website, Chartwells offers “an exciting range of educational tools that help your students make wise, informed decisions.” The company’s clients inclue several universities across the nation, including Texas’ Angelo State University, Lamar University, and the University of Texas at Dallas.

The Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported in July that Del Mar College had joined Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in outsourcing its custodial staff and groundskeepers, replacing 17 full-time custodians, five full-time groundskeepers and 66 part-time employees. The school reportedly expected the change to save $720,000 annually.

TAMU-CC replaced its 57-member cleaning crew and expects to save $200,000 annually. The university contracted with Service Solutions of Knoxville, Tenn., which describes itself as “the premium provider of cleaning and facilities services”

Kilgore College, a community college in East Texas, outsourced some of its custodial staff to Marcis & Associates earlier this year. The school’s student newspaper reported that its board of trustees made the decision as a cost-cutting measure.

While online education has been a part of several colleges’ model for decreasing cost and increasing revenue, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board records, show outsourcing has been another popular cost-cutting measure across the state, covering everything from campus bookstores and computer services to student housing and administrative services.

Members of Occupy Grand Rapids are planning to spend Friday protesting state plans to privatize careworker positions at the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans.

In a Facebook post the group says that it will gather from 4:00 – 7:00 pm at the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans on 3000 Monroe Avenue Northeast.

Lets stand up on Veterans Day. Lets stand up for our vets who deserve the best care we can offer. Lets stand up and say we will not be held hostage by these profits before people policies. Tell Snyder that we will not stand for experienced, hard working, public health care employees being replaced by inexperienced and underpaid workers. Caring for our vets is such an important job that it should be compensated with benefits and a fair living wage.

The Grand Rapids Press reports the state is trying to privatize 170 unionized caregiver postions at the facility, which is one of only two in the state for veterans.

A five-year contract worth nearly $6.6 million has been awarded to Grand Rapids-based J2S Group HealthForce. State officials have argued the move will save more than $4.2 million, an estimate union leaders dispute because of turnover, training and other costs.

A resident of the Grand Rapids home has sued to stop the privatization and an Ingham County judge issued a temporary restraining order against the shift. State leaders are challenging that court ruling.

The Detroit Free Press reports that Pontiac’s newest Emergency Manager said that he wants to put together his own team to implement a financial plan that includes outsourcing services and increasing property taxes.

Under the plan, the clerk’s office is being merged with human resources. Vital records will be transferred to Oakland County and the Oakland County Clerk’s Office will provide technical assistance in election administration. The number of voting districts in Pontiac also will be reduced.

The law department in Pontiac, about 20 miles northwest of Detroit, is being outsourced to Troy-based Giarmarco, Mullins and Horton.

An employee with United Water, which is contracted to manage the city’s wastewater treatment facilities, will run the public works department. The employee will work at City Hall and efforts will be made to subcontract as many public works activities as possible, according to the plan.

In May, then-Emergency Manager Michael Stampfler privatized operation of the city’s wastewater treatment by signing a contract with United Water, a New Jersey-based subsidiary of the French company SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT that has been indicted on felony charges related to its operation of the wastewater treatment facility in Gary, Ind.

According to a 26 count indictment announced by the U.S. Justice Dept. in Dec., two United Water employees manipulated daily wastewater sampling at the Gary plant by turning up disinfectant levels before measuring the levels of E. coli bacteria and other contaminants.

MDOC director Dan Heyns acknowledged that the moves are drastic measures that will impact employees, prisoners families, and communities, but he told the Detroit News “closing a prison … ought to be a cause for celebration.”

Mel Grieshaber, executive director of the 7,500-member Michigan Corrections Organization, said the plan “stinks” and the projected savings don’t make sense.

The prisons budget of nearly $2 billion has been a major target of state lawmakers looking for cuts because it nearly all comes from state revenue, rather than federal subsidies.

Heyns said the plan was developed as a contingency during talks with unions to find $145 million in employee cost savings. But he decided it makes sense to implement it regardless of the outcome of negotiations, he said.

Health care in Michigan prisons is already partially privatized and the unions that represent state workers have suggested that the state should reconsider its contract with Prison Health Services:

Tennessee-based Prison Health Services (PHS) provides healthcare services in Michigan prisons at a cost of roughly $100 million every year. Reconsideration is especially timely because PHS is being acquired by the Missouri-based Correctional Medical Services, the other giant in the field, leading to a near-monopoly on the service. The absence of meaningful
competition is itself a reason to doubt the effectiveness of outside contracting.

As ProPublica reported Tuesday, the $2 billion class-action claims security firms, support companies like KBR Inc., and their insurance providers “routinely lied, cheated and threatened injured workers,” while flouting the World War II-era law guaranteeing coverage for private workers supporting the U.S. military.

Reporter T. Christian Miller investigated how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have strained the system over the last few years, but the latest complaint may be the most far-reaching yet:

The lawsuit, believed to be the first of its kind, charges that major insurance corporations such as AIG and large federal contractors such as Houston-based KBR deliberately flouted the law, thereby defrauding taxpayers and boosting their profits. In interviews and at Congressional hearings, AIG and KBR have denied such allegations and said they fully complied with the law. They blamed problems in the delivery of care and benefits on the chaos of the war zones.

The suit names Houston-based KBR, Xe Services — the security firm formerly known as Blackwater — and Dyncorp International among the defendants, along with insurance giants AIG and CNA Global Insurance, the two major insurance providers for private workers under U.S. Department of Defense contracts.

Four Texas men are included as plaintiffs, along with others around the U.S. and South Africa. Their injuries include blast wounds from explosives, infected sandfly bites, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.

Washington lawyer Scott Bloch, a former U.S. Special Counsel under George W. Bush, told the Texas Independent that he first heard about contractors’ troubles with their medical claims shortly after he started his private practice. Bloch represents former Blackwater employees in a separate case filed in June, also over medical benefits.

“My experience tells me it’ll require hundreds of millions of dollarsin damages for them to wake up,” Bloch said. He hopes this class action will eventually result in criminal and internal investigations, not only into the private companies named in the suit, but the government agencies that handle their contracts.

Contractors across the country continue fighting drawn-out cases over individual claims, and a 2009 House subcommittee hearing on health benefits for war contractors has brought little change in the law.

“This is a massive scandal, this is a bigger scandal than Walter Reed — much more wide-ranging,” Bloch said. “The light isn’t shining on it. The news outlets are like, ‘Well, we want the soldier’s stories. We want the guys carrying the guns with the sunglasses.’”

Houston attorney Gary Pitts has spent years on individual Defense Base Act cases involving some of the same companies and health issues — and testified before that House subcommittee hearing two years ago. While the types of injuries are different today than they were in 2004 — fewer truckers are injured by IEDs today — Pitts said the claims system remains just as difficult to navigate.

“We’re just sloggin’ away,” Pitts said. “Who knows how long this’ll go on?”

But grouping defendants together into class-action suit is a long shot for some claims in Bloch’s complaint, Pitts said, like allegations that workers were fired in retaliation.

“The trend of the courts over 10 to 20 years has been to make it harder and harder to bring a class action,” Pitts said. “I would say the odds are very very hard.”

The
New York Times reports:

[Project on Government Oversight] said its study did not just compare the salaries of the two sectors; instead it focused on what the government actually pays contractors to perform services versus how much it would cost to have that work done by in-house staff members.

“That’s a big difference,” said Scott Amey, POGO’s general counsel. “We compared the full compensation paid to federal government and private sector employees to the billable rates in federal service contracts. Across the board you see that it cost government more to pay for contractors.”

For example, the study found that, on average, the federal government paid contractors $268,653 per year for computer engineering services, while government workers in the same occupation made $136,456.

For human resources management, the federal government paid contractors an annual rate of $228,488, more than twice the $111,711 to have the same services done in-house.

In a white paper on privatization Penn State University law professor Ellen Dannin writes that outsourcing often com involves hidden costs.

Many privatizers get special subsidies or in-kind services from governments. Often these are not counted when comparing before and after costs. The only fair way to compare would be to add these items to the cost of privatizing. Among the added costs that should be added in are services such as oversight and supervision, use of government-paid facilities or equipment, or outright subsidies.

…in the end, state officials decided the taxpayers would get a better deal to go this route: sell the Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Conneaut for $72.7 million to Corrections Corporation of America, which will be paid to house state inmates there; hire Management & Training Corp to operate the North Central Correctional Institution and operate the now-closed Marion Juvenile Facility as an adult prison camp.

State officials from the departments of budget, prisons and administrative services decided to merge Grafton Correctional Institution and North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility in Grafton and run it with state workers.

The president of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, which represents the state’s prison guards, said that he was surprised and pleased at the news, but that he was concerned about the employees of the prisons now under private control: ”A lot of the private-sector employees have lesser wages, lesser benefits.”

Kasich (R) had originally envisioned a $200 million sale, which ultimately turned out to be unattainable. But Mohr’s department claims to have saved $13 million through the reorganization, while simultaneously adding 700 beds to the system.

Mohr previously worked for the Corrections Corporation of America before being hired by the state, and he says that he distanced himself from the selection process for the sale in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. He says that the Conneaut sale is the first privatization of a state-built prison in America.

Teachers unions present the idea of using public dollars to pay for a child’s private school education as an effort to privatize primary and secondary education.

School choice advocates — the term used by those who support including charter schools, home schooling and vouchers for private schools into the public education mix — say unions fear the consequences of students foregoing those schools where labor has a foothold, which ultimately means a smaller number employees paying membership dues.

Both camps are equally impassioned, but one reason for these frayed emotions is not getting much coverage. To put it crudely, students are the resource that compels governments to spend billions on education, and Pennsylvania is witnessing a decline in its under-18 population even as the total number of people living in the state has gone up.

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the Keystone State is home to 12.702 million residents, an increase of 3.4 percent since 2000. However, in that same time period the number of individuals under the age of 18 has dropped by 4.5 percent — 2.792 million today versus 2.922 ten years ago.

As expected, the number of students enrolled in primary and secondary schools has gone down as well, but at different rates for public and private schools. Since 2005-2006, enrollment has tapered off by 2.7 percent within public schools — 1.78 million from 1.83 million (caveat: this includes charter schools that can be privately managed but still receive per-pupil public funding) — while charter schools have seen a much larger 14.9-percent drop off (276,527 from 324,902). The home-schooled population has also declined by just over 4 percent, 21,240 from 22,412. Those figures were obtained through the Pennsylvania Department of Education Data and Statistics division, which tallies school enrollment.

The earlier figures also show 40 more private schools in the state than there are today.

Legislators in Harrisburg have until June 30 to agree on a compromise over the voucher bill. Yesterday, TAI reported a state House member has announced his intention to provide a companion bill, albeit with more income restrictions and greater regulatory powers afforded to the state Department of Education than the Senate version.

Board assistant secretary-treasurer Vera Perry said the lower pay rate included in the bids for custodial services – from $15 per hour to $8.25 – were too harsh.

“To me, you’re asking them to go into bankruptcy,” Perry said.

“This is ridiculous, it’s politics,” said board member David Davenport.

Ed Dollin, director of operations for both FEATS and METS [the company with the low bid for pest control services], said the companies could negotiate with the district on pay rates.

“We’re going to give every one of those people (currently on staff) an opportunity to work for us,” Dollin said. “You guys can set the salary.”

The board has agreed to continue discussion on outsourcing custodial and other services.

Officials expect a final 2011-12 budget to be prepared by June 1.

Under the proposal, the Department of Corrections could either award the entire region to a single company, or could divide the region into smaller pieces. The deal would have to be approved by the Joint Legislative Budget Commission. #

The House had originally proposed privatizing just a portion of that region, including Broward and Miami-Dade counties, but agreed to the Senate’s version. Lawmakers also agreed to privatize prison health care statewide. #