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Voting machine
contract defended
NAACP says
contract proves county not concerned for small, local minority owned businesses.
By Scott Wyman -Sun Sentinel Newspaper
Staff writer
December 15 2001
Broward
County officials Friday defended the legality of a controversial
minority subcontract buried within their $17.2 million deal to buy
voting equipment even as powerful legislators threatened to withdraw
state aid.
The county's quick investigation and exoneration of the role to be
played by a Miami-based medical supply company came after Commission
Chairwoman Lori Parrish ordered staff not to mail out the signed
contracts and find out whether the county had been misled by executives
with Election Systems & Software.
The Sun-Sentinel reported that American Medical Depot will be paid to
transport the voting machines from ES&S in Nebraska to its Hialeah
warehouse and then to ship them to Broward, even though it has no
experience with election equipment. The vast majority of the $878,000
subcontract won't go to American Medical but will pass through the
company to buy the voting booths from ES&S's supplier.
Parrish said the county staff's review satisfied her concerns, but she
plans to hold back the contract until Wednesday afternoon to give other
commissioners a chance to raise objections.
"The staff has checked the contract, and it seems as if it doesn't
cost us any more money and that the Dade County firm is legitimately
going to assemble and test the machines," she said. "Someone
was going to have to do that. I'm comfortable it meets the requirements
of the code."
But the county's renewed blessing does not mean the end of the trouble.
State legislators and civil rights activists are skeptical about how
Broward is handling the minority issues involved in the purchase of
touch-screen computers.
Bill McCormick, president of the Fort Lauderdale branch of the NAACP,
said the American Medical deal shows the county is not concerned with
helping small, locally owned minority companies.
And state Sen. Skip Campbell, a Tamarac Democrat and member of the
Senate Finance Committee, and state Rep. Mike Fasano, a New Port Richey
Republican who is House majority leader, called on the state to
investigate whether its $2.3 million grant to the county is being
misused. They don't want state money being spent on profit-taking by
middlemen.
County commissioners signed the deal with ES&S this week. The county
set a goal that 10 percent of the contract go to minority firms, so
ES&S hired minority companies to work on the computers, in addition
to American Medical's role.
American Medical is owned by an Asian-American family in Miami |
Courtesy Sun-Sentinel www.sun-sentinel.com
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