Broward County commissioners turned down a request from their own staff to save more than a half-million dollars of taxpayer money: They opted to keep a marketing firm to encourage water conservation, saying it wasn’t fair to pull the plug after just one year.
The $565,000 contract with Upscale Events by Mosaic Inc. for “consultant services for water conservation outreach and communications” ran from last July and goes through June 30, 2027. An additional $625,000 in the contract calls for reimbursements for travel, advertising and printing, also for the duration of the five years.
County officials said it wasn’t possible to quantify if most or much of the marketing efforts have any impact on residents turning off their faucets or other conservation efforts through the website www.conservationpays.com, other than how many people visit the site.
But they could quantify how many people sought rebates for high-efficiency toilets.
Although the county sought a goal of 2,000 toilet rebates each year, there has only been 479 rebates in the last year, according to Jennifer Jurado, the deputy director Broward’s Resilient Environment Department.
The website encourages residents to apply to the county for a $100 rebate for purchasing a water-efficient toilet.
“We do not need a vendor for this activity any longer,” Leonard “Lenny” Vialpando, director of Broward’s Resilient Environment Department, told county commissioners, saying the county had automatically sought a new vendor when the last one retired.
“I understand there’s a narrative being told that we did nothing,” said Upscale Events by Mosaic owner Ann Marie Sorrell, who is also an elected official as supervisor of the Palm Beach County Soil & Water Conservation District.
She told county commissioners she inherited a system from the last vendor that had no record where advertising dollars were spent, and “we had to start this project from scratch,” including new social media initiatives.
After the meeting, she said work includes brand management, event planning, community outreach, rebate tracking and fundraising. “To say they can do it themselves when they haven’t done it for 15 years is a stretch, when you look at the scope,” she said, saying the county business fuels the economy. “They have a small department,” she said of county staff.
But county leaders said the business hadn’t had enough time to work: “I think somewhere there was no communication here,” said Commissioner Robert McKinzie.
It “doesn’t look good” to dismiss a small business, said Commissioner Hazelle Rogers.
“I could probably go through our budget” to find companies to dismiss and do the work by county staff, but this was not a problem company, said Commissioner Mark Bogen.
The vote failed 7-2 to terminate the contract with Commissioner Beam Furr and Michael Udine dissenting. “It’s too much money to spend on a program like this in these economic times,” complained Udine.
Still, he told the county staff not to give up: “If you find a way we can do something better and more efficiently for taxpayers, I really think it’s incumbent upon you to bring that to us as a board.”
Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com. Follow on Twitter @LisaHuriash