Nonprofit director says he was misled on bidding process for homeless site, wants Sonoma County supervisors to intervene

The director of the nonprofit that has run a key Sonoma County housing site for five years is accusing the health department of denying his agency an opportunity to continue the work into the future.

St. Vincent de Paul Sonoma County Executive Director Jack Tibbetts says county officials misled his group into thinking it had submitted a bid to continue at Los Guilicos Village when in fact it had not.

St. Vincent took on operation of the new 60-bed Los Guilicos transitional housing site in early 2020 as the county grappled with a sprawling homeless encampment on the Joe Rodota Trail. The county has extended its contracts with the nonprofit to run the site, which is near the community of Oakmont, ever since.

On Tuesday Tibbetts, a former Santa Rosa city council member, asked the Board of Supervisors for the second time to intervene.

It was unclear if they will do so, though Supervisor Susan Gorin, whose district includes Los Guilicos and Oakmont, asked the board to take up the matter at a future meeting.

Tibbetts’ board of directors has granted him the discretion to sue the county, he told The Press Democrat, though he emphasized that is a last resort for a cash-strapped charity.

In a statement to The Press Democrat last week, Sonoma County Department of Health Services Director Tina Rivera said her team encouraged St. Vincent to bid for the contract and was surprised when the organization didn’t.

As the county health department reorganizes its transitional housing sites for homeless people, officials intend to expand bed capacity by eliminating the current Los Guilicos Village tiny homes, which were always intended as temporary, and instead renovate two nearby dormitory buildings that were part of a former juvenile detention facility.

The confusion stems from two overlapping requests for proposals over the last year. One was to manage Los Guilicos Village under its current tiny home model. The other was to operate both the county’s ongoing and future transitional housing sites.

Officials suggested to Tibbetts that St. Vincent apply to the second request for proposals, though it did not mention Los Guilicos. That was because at the time the supervisors had not yet approved that plan, Rivera said.

Tibbetts says county officials gave St. Vincent the impression that because he applied for the first RFP he was in covered.

Earlier this month, Rivera said the winner of that bidding process will operate the new Los Guilicos dormitory project.

Tibbetts provided county supervisors with emails and text messages that he said show St. Vincent indicated a clear desire to health department officials to compete for managing Los Guilicos, and a response that led him and his staff to believe they had a bid under consideration.

The dispute is coming to a head amid other tensions between the Department of Health Services and some of its principle service providers. For months, nonprofits, including St. Vincent, that provide homeless services and substance abuse treatment went unpaid, leading to immense stress on the smallest of those organizations.

The county started making those payments after The Press Democrat reported on the matter earlier this month.

On Nov. 2, the day that story published, Tibbetts wrote the supervisors saying Rivera had attempted to retroactively change significant language in a contract for that work his agency had completed but not been paid for. In his email, Tibbetts told supervisors trust between service providers and the health department was at a low.

Meanwhile county officials announced on Nov. 20 that for-profit operator DEMA Consulting & Management, which has submitted bids under both RFPs, has largely failed to provide financial documentation to auditors reviewing its billing practices. The county auditor opened that investigation after the Press Democrat documented $26 million in billing by the health care staffing company and raised questions about some of its invoicing practices.

County supervisors voted Tuesday to extend the county’s current contract with St. Vincent once more, keeping the charity in charge of Los Guilicos until at least Jan. 31, with the option to extend once more to March 31. That contract, if extended through March, is capped at a little more than $745,000 for all five months.

If the county doesn’t change course on the competitive bidding process for the future version of Los Guilicos, Tibbetts said during the public comment period Tuesday, “I’m going to be spending the next five months beginning to lay off staff through attrition and prepare for closing down our operation.”

Supervisors also extended a contract with DEMA, which today is running a tent shelter site on the county’s administrative campus and Mickey Zane Place, a converted Santa Rosa motel. The county would pay the company $1.1 million over two months under that contract.

Timeline

In an Oct. 10 email to the supervisors, Tibbetts laid out why he believed health department officials misled St. Vincent into thinking it was in the running to operate the future Los Guilicos site. St. Vincent “clearly signaled its intent, on three separate occasions, to DHS staff,” to compete for a new contract to manage Los Guilicos, Tibbetts wrote in that email.

St. Vincent and DEMA both submitted bids under the first RFP, opened in December 2022. They were the only two providers to do so according to health officials. According to Tibbetts, “many months later,“ St. Vincent was notified the health department was going to start the bidding process over.

But it never did so. In a September item before the board, the health department reported that the two proposals “are under review.” It wasn’t until Oct. 26 that Rivera wrote Tibbetts to inform him that RFP would be closed without either party getting the contract.

Two months earlier, in August, Health Services issued the second RFP. That RFP named three of the county’s shelter sites, all operated at the time by DEMA: the 87-tent facility on the county’s administration campus; Mickey Zane Place, the former hotel on Healdsburg Avenue near downtown Santa Rosa; and a 26-space site made up of trailers parked on a corner of the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.

The RFP did not include Los Guilicos and made no reference to that site. But it did state the sites managed under the contract would change over the course of the contract, which could last as long as five years.

After that second RFP went public, Tibbetts texted Dave Kiff, director of the homeless services division within the Department of Health Services. He provided screenshots to the supervisors, which were obtained by The Press Democrat.

“Last we spoke, I thought you said (Los Guilicos) was being lumped into this large RFP of all the sites,” Tibbetts wrote. “However, when we log in, we don’t see an LG option.”

Kiff responded vaguely. “I encourage all providers to apply to existing opportunities as they arise,” he wrote.

Tibbetts pressed for specifics. “I just want to make sure we don’t miss our opportunity to apply,” he wrote.

Kiff texted back that he couldn’t comment any further.

In an email last week, Rivera said that being any more specific could have jeopardized the contracting process. She also wrote that county counsel had reviewed the second RFP and specifically had considered how to write one where the sites it applied to would change.

“Our Department has appreciated the service provided by SVDP at LG Village and have appreciated our partnership to date,” she wrote, referring to St. Vincent de Paul.

Tibbetts also provided the supervisors an Aug. 21 email between Adam Borovkoff, a department administrative officer, and a St. Vincent grant writer who asked for help resubmitting the charity’s previous bid for Los Guilicos.

In response, Borovkoff wrote St. Vincent did not need to do so. “That previous RFP for LG Village is still being reviewed,” he wrote.

And he added: “The current RFP is for all other current site(s), either one or more.”

At that point, Tibbetts wrote to the supervisors, his group believed “we had it on good authority that DHS had our proposal and no further action was required.”

On Oct. 2, Supervisor Gorin approached Tibbetts at a community meeting in Oakmont to say she was disappointed the charity hadn’t applied to stay on. That was the first point Tibbetts realized St. Vincent wasn’t in the running to manage Los Guilicos past its current contract, he said, leading him to email the supervisors eight days later.

Sixteen days after that email, Rivera wrote to tell Tibbetts the Los Guilicos Village competitive bidding process, the first RFP, was being closed without an award.

According to county officials, four providers applied for the second RFP. Bidding is closed but evaluations are ongoing. The county can contract with more than one provider to meet the demands of the RFP.

Applicants included DEMA; Sonoma Applied Village Services, which operates homeless outreach teams and a housing site in Sebastopol; FS Global Solutions, a logistics company focused on disaster response; and HomeFirst, a Bay Area homeless services nonprofit with considerable resources.

The county officials selecting the new contractor have narrowed the field down to two choices, according to the board meeting agenda, which did not name the finalists.

Supervisors worry about capable providers

When extending contracts with DEMA amid unanswered questions about its billing, supervisors have pointed to a lack of entities with the experience and size necessary to take on the difficult work housing people who often battle substance abuse and mental health issues.

“We do have a shortage of qualified and willing operators in this county,” Supervisor David Rabbitt said at a Nov. 20 editorial board meeting with The Press Democrat. “We really do. We have 3,000 nonprofits but not very many can really run a shelter. We're struggling with that to be honest.”

He and other supervisors repeated that sentiment on Tuesday.

St. Vincent is one of the county’s bigger and more experienced service providers in the homeless services field, alongside Catholic Charities. Now the county’s relationship with that provider appears like it could be headed for a rupture.

“We feel like we’ve been a good partner to the county,” Tibbetts said Tuesday. “You asked us to step up and help with the Joe Rodota trail crisis when all other nonprofits said no. We said yes.“

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88