Florida DCF contracts are worth billions – where does the money go?

I was wondering who holds the largest DCF contracts in Florida. The answer was right on the Florida Department of Financial Services website (thank you, Mr. Atwater), which lists public contracts with an ending date of February 29, 2012 or later.

I created a tableau where you can explore the DCF vendors by name, and see the list of contracts with details on their purpose, dates, and amounts. Click on the contracts to see their entry in the Florida Accountability Tracking System, including the contract documents, deliverables, payments, and audits.

The answer is that (depending on how you count) 12 organizations have received about half of DCF’s business since DFS started keeping track online.  Of that dozen, six organizations were CBCs, four were behavioral health networks, and the final two work with sexually violent offenders and psychiatric patients. Smaller CBCs and BHNs make up the next 25%, with the final quarter split among hundreds of small organizations, all the way down to air conditioner repair jobs and copying fees.

The total contract amounts need to be understood with a dose of context. Our Kids, for example, is the vendor for $1 billion over 10 years (5 years original, with 5 years renewed). The payment amounts get adjusted year to year based on statutory and contractual terms. And the contract amount is not the total cost of the child welfare system when you also factor in state, county, municipal, and charitable funding for all of the people and organizations who make their living adjacent to the system (including, for now at least, me).

Still, a billion dollars is a huge contract and the question of how it is being managed in Miami is particularly relevant today when Our Kids’ leadership team has resigned but not left office and DCF is holding stakeholder interviews to determine how people fighting to drink from that spigot think things are going.