Dane County Executive Melissa Agard has directed Dane County agencies to undertake a comprehensive review of how the county develops, manages, and oversees its contracts — a sprawling portfolio that includes roughly 800 contracts with more than 400 vendors, totaling an average of $272 million annually.
The review, led by the Department of Administration, is in its early stages, with no firm timeline beyond Agard’s request for recommendations by the end of the year. But nonprofit leaders who depend on county contracts say they welcome the conversation, and have a long list of suggestions, starting with one word that came up in every interview for this story: transparency.
“Let’s take a kick at the can”
Agard said the review wasn’t prompted by any single controversy, but by what she learned in her first year in office about the scope and complexity of county contracting.
“It wasn’t because of one simple thing,” Agard said. “It was coming in, being here for a year, learning about how things are done, and saying, okay, let’s take a kick at the can and figure out how it is that we can do better.”
The initiative comes at a time of significant fiscal pressure. The county faces a structural deficit, uncertain federal and state funding, and what Human Services Director John Schlueter described as the worst budget environment in at least 15 to 20 years.
“At a time when there’s the most heightened distrust in government possible, I take really seriously my role to build trust and remove barriers to trust at the local government,” said Agard, who previously served on the County Board and in the State Assembly. “Whether it’s buying sand and salt, building a building, a human services contract, or anywhere in between — I want to make sure that there are metrics that we can depend on.”
The watchword is “Transparency”
Schlueter’s department manages the largest share of county contracts by far, with a financial division of 80 people overseeing relationships with roughly 330 providers. He said the most consistent concern he hears from those providers is about transparency — particularly around the competitive bidding process.
“The biggest concern I got from providers about the contract process is transparency,” Schlueter said. “They want to know why they didn’t win the bid.”
Nonprofit leaders confirmed that’s exactly the frustration they feel.
Brandi Grayson, CEO of Urban Triage, said she has never received feedback after an unsuccessful bid. “Is it the design? Is it the language? Is it the unit cost? What is it?” she asked.
Linda Ketcham, executive director of Just Dane, pointed to a clear contrast with how the City of Madison handles the same process. When the city’s Community Development Division puts out a request for proposals, Ketcham said, all submissions are uploaded to the city’s website once the deadline passes, allowing anyone to see who bid and what they proposed. The city also shares scoring so applicants can see how they ranked.
“The county doesn’t do that,” Ketcham said. “The only response that anybody else ever sees is the one that gets the contract.”
Ketcham also noted that there is no appeal process if an organization believes something was off about the selection. “When you put an RFP out and you select a bidder, there’s no process to appeal,” she said.
Another transparency issue: the county does not always disclose how much money is available for a given contract. Ketcham said some RFPs include a dollar amount and others don’t, which forces agencies to guess, and those who bid the true cost of their services may lose to organizations that come in lower.
Scott Strong, executive director of RISE Wisconsin, said the uncertainty has caused him to walk away from opportunities entirely.
“There are times where I’ve actually passed up an RFP because I looked at it and it would cost us more to provide the services than they are offering,” Strong said. He suggested the county should provide budget guidance while still considering proposals that come in slightly over.
Lowest bid vs. best value
Several sources flagged the county’s practice of only awarding contracts to the lowest bidder as a structural problem.
Schlueter acknowledged the tension. “One of our concerns is, you always go with the lowest vendor, lowest bid, versus [best value] — because that’s how the system is built,” he said, adding that providers are frustrated by a process that forces them to undercut each other.
Ketcham said the dynamic is especially hard on smaller organizations that don’t have the fundraising infrastructure to subsidize a contract, since county funds don’t always cover all the expenses of a program. She said she has seen larger organizations, sometimes from outside the area, intentionally lowball a bid to win a contract, then come back a year or two later to renegotiate and raise the price.
“The contract with the lowest unit cost per person may not be the most efficient or effective,” Grayson said.
Frozen budgets and short runways
Contract length and budget structure are closely related frustrations. Multiple nonprofit leaders said short contract cycles — sometimes just one year — make it nearly impossible to plan ahead, recruit staff, or get a new program fully off the ground.
“Some of these contracts take three to five months to roll out, so that means you have six or seven months actually programming,” Grayson said.
Ketcham said short timelines make hiring difficult. “I’m going to be honest with people and say, I can only guarantee you one year in this position,” she said. “If they’re already employed, that’s not a very appealing prospect.”
Prenicia Clifton, CEO of Seeing Is Believing, which runs youth violence prevention and mental health programming, said one-year cycles are unfair to the communities being served. “One year — sometimes there’s not even enough time to fully lift the program up,” she said. “And it’s not fair to the community to say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna come in, we’re gonna do all this amazing work,’ but the county is gonna cut us off in one year.”
Even multi-year contracts present problems. Strong said that when RISE submits a proposal for a five-year contract cycle, the budget is locked at year-one levels for the entire period, with no inflation adjustment and no ability to carry over surpluses.
“If it’s $500,000, you do that for five years, and there’s no ability to actually increase that by 3% for inflation,” Strong said. Administrative rates are locked in the same way. He noted that non-human-services contracts — for roads and construction, for instance — seem to have more flexibility. “They certainly build in plenty of costs to cover their overhead and administrative salaries,” he said. “But for some reason, the nonprofit sector seems to be treated a little bit differently.”
Who the system works for
Several nonprofit leaders said the contracting process is more navigable for large, established organizations than for smaller or newer ones.
Grayson said the administrative burden of managing a county contract — reporting, compliance, quality assurance — is significant, and not accounted for in contract budgets. “That administration load is not incorporated in the grants, the funding, the budget line, because they don’t cover it,” she said.
Clifton said the proposal process itself is a barrier. “A lot of grant writing creates barriers to people who do the work,” she said, suggesting the county consider oral interviews or community presentations as alternatives.
Strong said the county should also involve providers and the people they serve earlier in the process, when RFPs are being designed, not just when proposals are being evaluated.
“I think they tend to do that more internally,” he said. “It would be really helpful if they actually talk to the community who provides those services and those who are receiving those services.”
Clifton also raised concerns about how outcomes are verified. She said reporting is largely self-directed: organizations submit narratives and data about what they’ve done, and the county takes their word for it.
“All you do is submit what you say you’ve done,” she said. “It’s based on your word.” She said she would welcome site visits and audits: “People actually doing the work wouldn’t mind you showing up,” she said.
The duplication question
Some nonprofit leaders raised a concern that goes beyond the contracting process itself: that the county has, in recent years, begun creating in-house programs that duplicate services already being provided by nonprofits — at significantly higher cost.
Ketcham said the trend has been growing over the past five or six years. She pointed to the county’s Behavioral Health Resource Center, which added a peer support program staffed by county employees rather than expanding funding to existing nonprofit peer support programs. County peer specialists are paid $30 or more per hour, she said, while nonprofit staff with the same credentials earn in the low $20s — and county benefit packages widen the gap further.
“It should be, really, a partnership, when it works,” Ketcham said. “But it hasn’t felt like a partnership for a number of years.”
Strong put numbers to the disparity. He said county social worker positions start at $69,000 to $81,000 — one and a half to two times what nonprofits can pay with the contract dollars they receive from the county. The result, he said, is that nonprofits invest in training staff who then leave for jobs with the county or other local governments like school districts.
“We do a lot of the training and get them up to speed, and then the county will hire them,” he said, estimating he could name five or six former RISE employees now working for the county.
What comes next
Schlueter said he sees the review as an opportunity, not a threat.
“These are not my dollars. This is not my building. I am a steward,” he said. “If there’s something I can do to share more, I’m happy to do that.”
He said he wants the transparency to go both ways, not just to satisfy critics, but to help him defend the work his department does as cuts loom.
“Show me, give me an explanation of why you exist. I need the data,” he said of his message to contract managers. “Not because I want to question them — I want to be able to help defend them.”
Agard said the review will include opportunities for community input, though the details are still being worked out. “I can guarantee you that there will be the opportunity for feedback and input and tough conversations,” she said.
For now, the nonprofit community is watching and hoping. As Ketcham put it: “We’re going to continue to try to be at the table instead of on the menu.”
