Though there are two meal delivery services for people living with HIV/AIDS in San Diego County, both of which applied for Ryan White CARE Act funding through the county this year, only one of those meal delivery services will receive CARE Act funds — Mama’s Kitchen.

Ruth Henricks, the founder, treasurer and board chair of Special Delivery met with county officials last month to discuss why the agency’s RFP (request for proposal) bid was denied. In a debriefing with Henricks, the county explained the rejection of Special Delivery’s RFP.

Speaking on behalf of the county, Terry Cunningham, Chief of the Office of AIDS Coordination, told the Gay and Lesbian Times, “The source selection committee reviewed their proposal and did not rate it high enough to be rewarded a contract.”

Henricks wrote the RFP herself, believing that since she has been with the organization since its inception, she was most qualified to put together the proposal.

According to county officials, the proposal was missing résumés for some employees listed with the agency’s organization. The county also expressed concern over a lack of stability in the all-volunteer organization.

“They felt that our qualifications for our office staff were not professional enough,” Henricks told the Times. “They felt that we had a fairly poor infrastructure because we are all volunteer and we don’t have a back up plan if all of our volunteers left.”

The county also questioned some of the written explanations of how the agency was run.

“I was explaining about some training we do,” Henricks recalled, “and I said, ‘We train very simply. We train weekly … on the job kind of a thing, but frankly putting sandwiches together is not brain surgery’ and they did not care for the fact that I said ‘It’s not brain surgery.’ They did not feel that was professional enough.”

The news that Special Delivery would not be funded came as a shock to the chair of the organization’s board, Tom Abbas, who said, “We fully expected to be funded since we have been audited regularly; we’ve been told that we are performing according to what the contract is and we have been doing it for 12 years.”

“The County has for many years discreetly tried to get rid of the dual meal service image,” added Henricks. “There are other cities that have several meal services for people living with AIDS. I don’t know why … some people feel that it’s such a blight on our image to have two services. We have more than two gay newspapers. If they want to say there isn’t enough money to support two food services, can’t I counter with, ‘Are there enough advertising dollars to support two gay newspapers in this city?’”

Abbas said he felt some of the issues that came up during the debriefing were not relevant to the RFP process, including concerns about a potential conflict of interest involving Special Delivery’s purchase of meal packets from The Huddle, a restaurant which Henricks owns and which shares kitchen space with Special Delivery.

However, said Abbas, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HERSA) addressed those issues years ago and said it was not a conflict of interest.

“Listening to the county representative that was kind of the liaison between the contracting department and the people that are reviewing the proposals I got the definite impression that there was some bias, because she brought up issues that had nothing to do with the RFP,” Abbas said. “That made us think that if she’s bringing it up to us in this meeting, when it doesn’t have anything to do with this meeting, there is a good chance that she could have brought that up with the people who are reviewing these proposals.”

Now that their contract with the county has been terminated, Special Delivery has been asked to turn over all of their client records, a term of the contract that has Henricks concerned.

“All records are property of the county, and that’s simply because of the fact that if the feds come in and audit, they are going to want to see the records that were viable at that time,” Cunningham said. “That does not mean they can’t make copies of those records and keep those for themselves, but they need to give us the records that are, according to their contract, County property.”

However, Henricks questions how the county plans to use the records.

“I’m just concerned that they are going to make the sound of this newly funded agency of Mama’s Kitchen so appealing that they’re going to try to lure people away from us,” Henricks said. “If they can give them a better service, my desire is to make sure that these people eat and become healthy, and if they can do it this way, fine. [However], I think this is a terribly, terribly underhanded, bullying, unprofessional and uncaring way of doing business.”

Cunningham responded to her concerns, saying, “What I have heard is that Ruth is afraid the county is going to turn around and give those records to Mama’s Kitchen. We can’t do that; there are confidentiality rules. But there is also a caveat in there because we need to make sure the CARE Act is the payer of last resort, so we will be extrapolating the names and addresses of all of the clients of Special Delivery and giving those to Mama’s Kitchen so Mama’s Kitchen can ask people who call in if they have been or are being provided meals by Special Delivery, because we don’t want there to be double dipping.”

When asked if clients would be contacted by the county about Special Delivery no longer having a contract with the county, Cunningham did admit, “We have the option of doing that to let them know that there is another service that is available to them that is contracted through the county, but in no way, shape or form will we state that they can’t use Special Delivery. That would be totally inappropriate to do. It’s just to let them know.”

This is not the first time that Special Delivery has been turned down for funding under an RFP from the county. In 1996, the last time the county put out an RFP, Special Delivery’s proposal was rejected. After protests by their clients at HIV Planning Council meetings and a round of visits to county officials, Henricks was able to secure some county funding to hold the agency over until the county put out a Request for Bid (RFB) in 1998, at which time both Special Delivery and Mama’s Kitchen began to receive Ryan White CARE Act funds.

“The reason it was changed to an RFB was because we were trying to simplify the process,” Cunningham said about the prior change in the bidding process. “It’s much easier for the providers to respond to because they just have to give us a bid and they don’t have to respond to all of these questions. This time, instead of going out for a request for bid, because [the county] had complaints from the providers that they needed the ability to renegotiate and have flexibility in their budgets [because of unforeseen costs including increased electrical rates and food costs], that meant we had to go out to a request for proposals.”

Even without county funds, Special Delivery representatives said they do have money saved up and plan to use it to get by until they can begin a fundraising campaign to compensate for the loss.

“If we get funding from the county we are lucky and that helps us cover the cost of taking care of those people,” said Abbas. “If we don’t get funding from the county we are still taking care of people with AIDS.… We don’t consider the people we are servicing as a commodity the county owns.”