Q&A
Changes in agency funding for language access services after DCAS contract expiration
1:21:31
·
139 sec
Council Member Avilés inquires about changes in agency funding for language access services following the expiration of the DCAS contract. Kenneth Lo from MOIA explains the transition and current state of language access service procurement.
- Agencies were always required to fund their own language access services, even under the DCAS contracts
- DCAS contracts expired due to bottlenecks affecting cross-agency service delivery
- Currently, agencies procure their own language access contracts, with some guidance from MOIA
- MOIA plans to work with the Mayor's Office of Contract Services to establish a prequalified list of vendors to ensure quality and ease the procurement burden on agencies
Alexa Avilés
1:21:31
Yep.
1:21:32
Got it.
1:21:32
Okay.
1:21:33
That's helpful.
1:21:35
Is it true that with the expiration of the decast contract agencies are using their own funding to contract for language access services?
Kenneth Lo
1:21:48
The day cast contracts were set up so that day cast had been the central administrator of them.
1:21:57
But any change you'll see even under those contracts were required to buy into those contracts.
1:22:03
So all of the funding was provided by the agencies.
1:22:07
Decast those contracts expired because Decast was having certain bottlenecks that impacted the cross agencies.
1:22:17
Like, some agencies, of course, use much more than others.
Miral Abbas
1:22:20
Mhmm.
Kenneth Lo
1:22:21
And in trying to increase contracts to meet those needs, it created situations where others didn't have access And so, actually, TCAS moved out of the role of having a centralized contractor except for telephonic and now a video remote interpretation.
1:22:44
And the reason for that is that's one of those arenas where a city wide contract was required to make sure that the vendor was had the technical infrastructure to meet the demand for such a large scale of use.
1:23:05
Currently, agencies do buy their own contracts, which provide some guidance.
1:23:10
Moving forward, as I mentioned in testimony, we do wanna work with the mayor's office of contract services to establish a more what we call a prequalified list of vendors.
1:23:24
So that they're we ensure that they meet a certain quality threshold and also to ease the procurement burden from agencies.
1:23:34
You know, amongst the many things that agencies procure, language services is a very specific kind of service.
1:23:40
Mhmm.
1:23:41
We wanna make sure that we're contributing to make sure that there's appropriate set of partners with city agencies to do that work.
