Councilmember Restler questions Compass RFP scoring inconsistencies for Hasidic community provider

Thank you so much to the esteemed and impressive co-chairs of this hearing.

Really appreciate your great leadership.

And congratulations again, Commissioner.

I really enjoyed sitting down with you some weeks ago and checking in on some of the compass concerns that we've been hearing from our communities.

And, you know, I just think it's a great thing to have somebody with such deep expertise in youth development leading the agency.

And we know there's a really strong bench supporting you at DYCD and look forward to working with you and your team.

I continue to be concerned about kind of the compass process.

I fully appreciate that, you know, whenever we put out a new RFP, I mean, part of the reason we haven't put out this RFP for 10 years is because they're winners and losers and it's an incredibly bumpy process to go through.

So the last administration handed you this, you know, hot potato, I guess I'll call it, for the purposes of being diplomatic.

But, you know, as I've shared with you, we have, just to give one example, a provider that serves the Hasidic community in Williamsburg that's been an excellent provider for many, many years.

They had hundreds of seats.

They now have dozens.

And they were the one provider that served that community.

And they scored really well.

I know you're not going to speak to an individual provider, but I'm going to just give you the specific context for my district to make this real.

And so I think we want to, it would help me to understand, like, how could one provider score excellently at one location and above the threshold, but not at a different location when it's the same team providing the same excellent services across the board?

So within each competition, there's evaluators that are reading, and the evaluating team could be different across the board, right?

So it's all objective based on how the provider has demonstrated that they can provide these services.

And the other part, too, is that depending on how...

You're saying objective, but isn't that inherently subjective, right?

Like that is the precise definition of a subjective process is that it's different readers, and some readers are determining that this organization is excellent, and two blocks away where they have a different site, they're determining they're not.

That is, I mean, sorry to interrupt you, but.

No, no, no, it's fine.

And, but I would also just add that it really depends on what other providers competed in that competition, right?

If the.

If the program was, sorry, if the competition was extremely competitive, that's where you're going to see the disparity in sports.

I can appreciate that you could have different, at a given location, some other organization applied and is even more excellent than the group that's been there for 30 years, and they get selected because they did even better.

I struggle to understand is how one organization can be reviewed as excellent at this location, but at these other locations in the neighborhood where they've been doing an excellent job for 30 years and always scored well on all of their DYCD contracts and all of their performance reviews,

how they could be found to have such a different score based on who's reading it.

It just, that is what really pains me and is paining my community.

I want to, I appreciate what you're saying, and I do think this is very nuanced.

And what I would say is, I just, I think there's assumption in some of the questions, right?

The assumption is that they did poorly in one section and good in another section.

And the truth is that they could have done really well, but there was greater competition in one, and there were more providers that were invited or that came to that proposal.

So if you have 10 in one section and you have five in another and you rank number seven and there are six slots, so I want to just offer that nuance, but I don't want to take away from what you spoke about earlier.

So it's not like that they did poorly, right, if we give that example, and then better in another one.

It's really that they might have done really well in both, but there was greater competition.