Ramsey County's 911 Grant: $273,011 on a No-Bid Contract

A Justice Department Inspector General audit⧉ of a $2,965,000 federal grant funding new 911 dispatch radios and radio-tower generators in Ramsey County, Minnesota found that county officials spent the entire $273,011 cost of three replacement generators through a contract they never put out to competitive bid -- a cost auditors flagged as unallowable, on a grant whose entire purpose was keeping the county's emergency-communications network working.

The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services⧉ awarded Ramsey County -- Minnesota's second-most populous county, home to Saint Paul and the state's largest 911 dispatch center -- $2,965,000 in September 2024 to replace aging first-responder radios and the generators that keep radio towers running during power outages.▸ Auditors tested every dollar the county drew down. Of the $2,791,569 pulled by January 2026, they verified $2,518,558 spent properly on 398 radios and peripherals. The remaining $273,011 -- the entire cost of the three generators -- went through a sole-source contract with a vendor tied to the Ramsey/Washington Recycling & Energy Board that the county never competitively bid, in violation of its own approved budget. The staff who bought the generators told auditors they relied on incorrect guidance from the Finance Department claiming the contract had been competitively bid; the officials managing the award said it was their first experience with a federal grant.

The grant budget originally covered four generators.▸ Partway through, Ramsey County found other funding to cover one of them, so only three were bought with grant money -- but the county never told the COPS Office⧉ about the swap, as the award's duplicative-funding condition requires. County officials said they simply didn't know the notification process existed, and that they'd like to reallocate the leftover budget toward more radios. Of the OIG's four recommendations, the COPS Office concurred with all of them; Ramsey County agreed with three but pushed back on this one, arguing the fourth generator became unnecessary through a separate county project rather than duplicative funding -- the OIG's closing analysis didn't accept the distinction, noting the county's own procurement policy doesn't address funding from multiple sources for the same purpose.

Beyond the generators, auditors found Ramsey County's paperwork problems ran deeper than one contract.▸ The grant's $636,179 in FY2024 federal expenditures⧉ was left off the Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards inside the county's own FY2024 single audit -- the document meant to give federal agencies and the public a complete count of a government's federal spending for the year. County officials blamed a manual compilation process for missing it. That single audit itself arrived more than six months past its statutory deadline, filed in April 2026; a county official attributed the delay to the prior year's audit also running late, filed in May 2025 after numerous financial-statement errors required correction. That FY2023 audit had already surfaced material weaknesses and significant deficiencies in the county's controls, findings the new report doesn't erase.

A third gap surfaced in how the county pulled its own grant money.▸ Federal rules require drawdown requests timed to cover only immediate costs, but Ramsey County made just one drawdown request between December 2024 and July 2025⧉ -- a roughly seven-month stretch -- because the official responsible for overseeing drawdowns didn't know a prior request had failed. Auditors found no formal drawdown procedure behind any of it. In 2024 the county had created a Grants & Revenue Office to centralize oversight after years of department-by-department grant management, but a countywide grants manual meant to standardize these processes wasn't expected to launch until late 2026 at the earliest -- the county's written response to the audit put it in "final draft" and targeted for that summer.