Canna Chronicle
The cannabis boom is well underway in Florida and the Florida Department of Health is struggling to keep up.
Source: Miami Herald
First, thousands of patients were forced to wait minimum 90 days under the previous rules, now they must wait on the understaffed and under-qualified Florida Department of Health’s “Florida Office of Medical Marijuana” and its 12 employees. We have to take into consideration that Christian Bax, the director of the Florida Office of Medical Marijuana, was given the job without previous qualifications, not to mention the job was never publicly posted.
it’s funny because the FOMM was originally going issue a non-bidding contract to a private company, to come in and issue the cards more “efficiently”.
What they agreed to do instead was to issue an “Invitation to Negotiate” and open up the contract bid to other vendors.
BUT they made the rule so hard that only a handful of companies would qualify for this Medical marijuana card issuance contract.
Also, during their Q&A addendum, The DOH made it clear that the winning contractor must turn around cards to patients in a minimum of 21 days. Better than 90 days, but not fast enough. Some Hospice patients don’t even have 21 hrs to wait.
The DOH also did it all very quietly, without a press release and you can’t even search for it on their site search because they didn’t tag it.
You can only find the request at:
http://www.myflorida.com/apps/vbs/vbs_www.search_r2.criteria_form
select agency: “Florida Department of Health” From the drop-down menu
Scroll down and click the “Advertisement Search” button
and you will find it… unless the site is down… again.
How can The Florida Department of Health call it a “competitive solicitation” when they don’t do a press release nor tag any of the keywords for the search? You literally can’t even search for this contract.
Sources tell us a backroom deal has already been made to award this contract to “Brandt Information Systems”, whose partner, John Thomas “JT” Burnette is currently under FBI investigation. We cannot confirm nor deny this but if that is true, then one could suspect that the Florida Department of Health manufactured the understaffing in order to justify the private contract to the same company that’s currently issuing hunting licenses for the state of Florida.