Dead bodies in Chicago racking up costs !

Chicago pays $915 per body for morgue transport; alderman says that's too much
Posted by Hal Dardick at 7 a.m.



An influential alderman is arguing that Chicago pays far too much to transport bodies to the morgue, but the attorney for the company that does the work says it must charge that much to make a profit under strict city regulations.

Ald. Ed Burke (14th), chairman of the Finance Committee, plans to conduct hearings on the city contract with GSSP Enterprise Inc., which the city has paid $7.2 million since the start of its current five-year contract in September 2006.

The city currently pays $915 a trip. Under the company’s previous Chicago contract, it was paid $200 a body, or $300 for two bodies, a city Web site shows. In Dayton, Ohio, where the company is based, it only receives $75 a body, Burke said.

The alderman's push comes two-and-a-half years after the Tribune reported widespread problems with the company. You can read that story below.


“It is just inconceivable to me that Chicago pays so much to remove a deceased body, when other cities pay far less,” Burke said, noting the city’s current financial straits.

But Tony Cicero, general counsel for GSSP, said the company was losing money and nearing bankruptcy under its previous contract with Chicago. He also said GSSP was the lowest, most responsible bidder for its current deal.

Chicago requires body pickup at all city locations within 75 minutes of a call to dispatch, Cicero said.

“GSSP in Chicago has an operation running 24/7,” he added. “In no other municipality is that required.”

Employees who work for the company also have unionized, raising the company’s costs for the eight to 12 employees it has on duty at any given time, Cicero said.

“We have not heard anything from Ald. Burke and would be happy to sit down with him and answer his questions,” Cicero said.

Tribune's Dec. 24, 2006 story by Brendan McCarthy and Bob Secter:

Police call them the body snatchers, and their invasion from Ohio began in 2004 when a Dayton company called GSSP Enterprises Inc. won a city contract for the grim but necessary task of hauling thousands of Chicago's dead to the morgue.

Since then, GSSP has mixed up bodies, routinely overbilled for services, failed to meet commitments to use minority subcontractors and violated contract rules designed to preserve the dignity of the dead, a Tribune investigation has found.One former employee told the Tribune the company skimped so much on required staff and equipment that he sometimes was forced to stuff five or six bodies into a single van, even though one was the maximum the city allowed in most cases and never more than two.

A city audit last year found the company had failed to spend a penny with some of the minority-owned vendors it had promised to hire. Yet officials with the Daley administration's procurement office, which oversees city contract awards, took no action and said they aren't aware of any chronic problems with the performance of GSSP.

They recently rewarded the Dayton firm with a new five-year, $15.5 million deal that boosts the rate the city pays by 335 percent--to $915 from $210 for each body transported to the Cook County medical examiner's office from the scenes of murders, accidents, suicides and many natural deaths.

That is far more than paid elsewhere in the nation for the same service, experts say. The Cook County Sheriff's Police, for example, pay $130 per body to another company.

"What they pay them in Chicago, that's just ridiculous," said Bob Keller, director of the coroner's office in Lucas County, Ohio, where GSSP once worked and was paid $85 for each corpse it transported. "That can't be right."

But it is, and the story of how GSSP came to gain and maintain its increasingly lucrative Chicago franchise opens a window into how the city manages its portfolio of more than $3 billion in contracts.

Mayor Richard Daley last year ordered contract oversight increased after scandals, including abuses of the city's affirmative action set-aside program for minority owned firms. The GSSP experience raises questions about the effectiveness of those reforms.



`Exceptional service'

GSSP is owned by Brian Higgins, 35, a mortuary school graduate from Dayton. Higgins said his body-hauling firm has done a good job at a fair price for Chicago.

"GSSP and myself have provided the city with exceptional service--and I emphasize exceptional, uninterrupted service--for the past 2 1/2 years," Higgins said in an interview.

GSSP arrived in Chicago with glowing references from officials in the Montgomery County coroner's office in Dayton, where Higgins has personal business ties to some officials. His firm has held the body-hauling franchise there for several years and is paid $75 per transport--less than one-tenth of the Chicago rate.

Elsewhere in Ohio, however, GSSP had dissatisfied customers whom Chicago officials now acknowledge they knew nothing about. Just weeks before Chicago hired the firm in 2004, it was fired by Cuyahoga County, which encompasses Cleveland.

"They didn't have any resources, they couldn't adequately staff, they looked like they just crawled out of a garbage bin," said Adrian Maldonado, spokesman for the Cuyahoga County Office of Procurement. The Cuyahoga contract paid $88 for each body, but it was terminated less than a year after it began.

The story was similar in Lucas County, which includes Toledo, where Keller said GSSP was chronically late for pickups and arrived in "shabby" vehicles. Lucas County paid GSSP $85 per transport, but it dropped the firm in 2004 when its two-year contract expired.



Disastrous mix-up

Less than a year into its Chicago deal, GSSP's conduct came into sharp focus when its workers, in violation of the city contract, used the same van to transport two women who had died of natural causes in separate homes. The identities of the bodies became switched, and the mix-up wasn't discovered until one of the women was buried by the other's family.

The medical examiner's office blamed GSSP, but Higgins insisted his workers weren't at fault. He said police had waived a contract provision limiting most transports to one body a vehicle. A police spokeswoman said no waiver was granted.

Lawsuits filed against GSSP by the families of the women were settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money.

Herschel Walker, a member of the early troops of $10-an-hour body haulers, said he often was required to transport multiple corpses in the same van during the year he worked for GSSP.

"There was times where me, myself, I had five and six in one van," recalled Walker, 24, who at the time was attending mortuary school and now works at a West Side funeral home. "Sometimes we even had seven."

Though the company had two vans for transports, it rarely had enough staff on duty to operate both, Walker said. He said he received no safety training, despite the danger of contact with bodily fluids. Walker said the vans were short of protective suits.

"Sometimes we didn't even have body bags," he said, adding that bodies were moved without them. The protective gear and the body bags were required under the city contract.

Higgins denied Walker's allegations and contended it would have been impossible to carry that many corpses in a van.

As is the case with most city contracts, GSSP was required to spend more than 21 percent of the value of its deal with minority- and women-owned subcontractors. Higgins himself is African-American, but his firm doesn't qualify for minority contractor status in Chicago because it is headquartered outside the metropolitan area.

Under its 2004 contract, GSSP lined up a roster of minority- and women-owned subcontractors it promised to hire.

GSSP also was required to file reports every three months detailing its spending with those firms.

The reports were never filed.



Subcontracting problems

One of GSSPs first subcontractors was Highland Park Ford. Carl Statham, the dealership's president at the time, said GSSP ordered three blue Ford Windstars but never picked them up or paid for them.

"I got stiffed with the vans," Statham said. "You know what it's like to sell a blue van? Blue is not popular.

"We couldn't even get in touch with them. Those damn vans just sat with us."

Statham said he called the city's procurement office several times to complain, but nothing happened. He estimated each van cost at least $20,000.

Higgins said he refused to take delivery because the dealership didn't order the kind of vehicles he specified. Instead, he said, he used older vans brought in from Ohio.

Another minority subcontractor on Higgins' list was Front Office Staffing, a Loop personnel agency he promised to pay up to $28,000 annually.

The staffing firm's job was to help hire body haulers, but it did much more than that, said co-owner Colleen Ahmed. GSSP lacked an office for its first several months in Chicago, so Ahmed said she let it use her office as a base.

Ahmed said she eventually kicked GSSP out after Higgins balked at paying the $17,000 she billed him as a finder's fee for his staff.

After a year of wrangling, Ahmed said she finally agreed to accept about half.

"Until Brian gets the bill, he's the nicest person around," Ahmed said. "But the minute Brian has to pay, you don't hear from him again."



Revealing audit

In what it described as an "interim audit," the Procurement Department last year found GSSP seriously out of compliance with its minority subcontracting pledges. GSSP had promised to hire seven minority subcontractors, but it hadn't paid a thing to five of those firms, the audit found.

GSSP's outlay to minority subs should have been at least $147,700 by mid-2005, the audit found. Instead, it had been only $10,832, just about 7 percent of the required amount.

Procurement officials took no action, though a note attached to the audit and sent to Higgins warned that GSSP could face "monetary penalties." Responding to a request by the Tribune, a department spokeswoman said no follow-up to the interim audit could be found.

At City Hall, oversight of the body-hauling contract is split between the Procurement and Police Departments. Police spokeswoman Monique Bond called GSSP a "good vendor" that provides "affordable" service. At the same time, Bond said police were tightening scrutiny of GSSP because of unspecified questions about its past performance.

"We want to ensure that those discrepancies don't occur in the future," Bond said.

Douglas Yerkes, a top procurement agency deputy, said the department had logged no complaints about GSSP. Yerkes speculated that Chicago might be paying top dollar for body hauling because it may be requiring GSSP to commit more staff and equipment than do other municipalities.

Higgins has signed two contracts with the city, and in both he has promised significant use of minority subcontractors. His current deal commits to spend up to $455,000 with a travel agency and up to $434,000 with a computer networking specialist.

He also promised to spend $2.1 million with Sutton Ford, a minority-owned dealership in Matteson. GSSP's new contract with the city requires it to keep a fleet of four vans, and it took delivery on them last month. The cost is a little more than $20,000 each.

Most of his spending pledge to Sutton Ford would be satisfied with the purchase of a mobile morgue for use in the case of mass casualties, Higgins said. He said he was developing the vehicle with police.

But Bond said police have not asked Higgins for such a vehicle and have no interest in it.

The Cook County medical examiner's office would not comment on GSSP's service because it is not a county contract.

Prior to the arrival of GSSP, body-hauling duties in Chicago were the responsibility of police. They hated the task.

The Federation of Police had long pressed to privatize body hauling, and an independent arbitrator finally ordered that be done a few years ago as part of contract negotiations between the city and the police union.



Lax regulations

City regulators have been accommodating to GSSP, which last year hired the law firm of influential developer Peter Bynoe to represent it on legal and lobbying matters with the city. Bynoe, a onetime Daley appointee to the Chicago Plan Commission, made a pitch on Higgins' behalf to Yerkes' boss, Chief Procurement Officer Barbara Lumpkin, when GSSP was bidding for its new deal last year.

Payment vouchers show the company routinely overbilled the city by hundreds of dollars each month. The only consequence was that a city comptroller's office employee had to adjust the math downward repeatedly before cutting checks, city records show.

City officials also told GSSP it didn't have to operate as many vehicles or maintain as big a staff as the contract called for. Police had overestimated the number of bodies the firm would be called upon to transport, meaning GSSP's revenues would fall short of expectations.

The city didn't stop there. Officials let GSSP out of the deal only one year into a three-year contract. It was put out for bid again with new specifications, and GSSP was free to seek higher compensation.

It did, and won the bidding over other competitors.

Under the new deal, which went into effect late summer, GSSP is now paid $915 a body. But the contract contains an escalator clause.

By 2008, the price can rise to $960. It can go up again the following year to $1,008. And by 2010, GSSP can bill the city $1,059 every time it moves a body to the morgue.