The companies - one from Temple, the other from Belton - are among 14 bidders vying for a drug-testing contract that is state mandated. The companies have submitted similar steroid-testing playbooks adapting a longtime “gold standard” of drug screening - the Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer test (GC-MS) conducted at Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)-approved labs.
Even though they use this same standard - Compliance Safety Systems of Temple and Compliance Consortium Corp. of Belton - they each sit on opposing sides of the Leon River and have different strategies of winning the lucrative legislative contract from the UIL.
Dr. Mark Cousins, UIL athletic coordinator, said the organization could not release any information as to which organization would serve on the evaluation team.
The UIL sent evaluation criteria to prospective drug screening companies earlier this year.
“The evaluation team is currently looking at bids based on the criteria we provided,” Cousins said.
The two local companies hope to win, but all they can do right now is wait and see.
Compliance Safety Systems - Temple
“We operate in a thin slice of a small pie,” said Marty Martin, the vice president at Compliance Safety Systems. “We operate so far below the radar, most people don’t know what we do.”
The Temple company operates from the second floor of a generic strip mall building off South Loop 363. The building also houses a chiropractor, who doubles as a collector for the company’s urine tests before they are sent to a lab.
Martin, a retired K-9 commander, entered the private sector of drug enforcement in the mid-1980s. When he first joined the drug detection private industry, he used specially trained dogs that sniffed out drug users at work on oil rigs. Martin said drug-sniffing dogs became obsolete as lab testing became the norm and companies didn’t want to carry the liability for dogs prone to taking down drug users.
The company boasts a Web site that is client friendly, which could potentially guide the UIL through their Web portal with usernames and passwords - if they win the bid.
“No one can compare to what we have,” Martin said.
He said while other bidders are close, none of them could compete with the ease of Web-based technology that would store all files electronically and allow the UIL and school districts to pull their appropriate test-result information.
“The UIL could potentially see anything because they would need to answer to the Legislature,” said Douglas Brodie, vice president of operations. “The schools would only be able to see their own information.”
The Compliance Safety Systems would do the legwork, including the intake of urine samples, sending actual lab work to Quest Diagnostics in California - one of the federally approved SAMHSA certified labs in the country with the ability to test urine for steroids.
Martin attributes the company’s current success to a good team - one that includes his wife of over two years, Cheryll Martin.
“We have about a 7 percent chance of getting the contract,” Brodie said. He explained this was a realistic estimate that all 14 companies could expect to hope for.
Compliance Consortium Corporation - Belton
Compliance Consortium Corporation already holds transportation employee drug-testing contracts with 88 Texas school districts, including Fort Worth, Waco and Huntsville. Of about 1,000 Texas school districts, Gary Baird, the current president and chief executive officer, said he tests employees in 342.
“With my information, I have the largest number of school districts in Texas,” Baird said.
Baird started his company, a substance abuse testing center, in 1994, hedging his bets as federal mandates rolled out in 1995 and 1996 requiring drug testing for employees with commercial driver’s licenses.
Compliance Consortium Corporation specializes in five types of employee drug tests, including pre-employment, random testing, post accident, return to duty and follow-up tests. The company can also conduct tests for pregnancy and marijuana use, as well as employee drug screens, through portable devices.
“We are pretty diversified in here,” Baird said.
The diversification could help Compliance Consortium Corporation in the bidding process as they already have conducted voluntary steroid testing for five districts in Texas last year. A total of 52 steroid tests were conducted last year, but Baird would not commit to how many came back positive.
“None came back positive to my knowledge,” Baird said. “But I wouldn’t tell you if they had.”
Client confidentiality is strictly adhered to in Compliance Consortium Corporation with the on-site laboratory in a stand-alone brick building in downtown Belton and offices locked up like a submarine. The on-site laboratory would not handle the potential UIL contracted steroid tests and Compliance Consortium Corporation would send collected tests, gathered onsite, to Quest Diagnostics in Kansas and California.
“The by-line of Compliance is confidentiality, especially with students,” Baird said. “Even if the test came back positive, the results would be between the parents, the student and the district.”
Baird said he believes that Compliance Consortium Corporation has a good chance of winning the two-year contract.
“I think it gives us a leg up with the 88 districts we already have,” Baird said. “We are already on site.”
As the bids for steroid testing are reviewed, practice for the fall football season is in full swing. Coaches Rodney Southern of Belton and Bryce Monsen of Temple said they will support the UIL’s decision and do whatever they can to help with the testing.
“(Drug testing) is a deterrent for kids,” Southern said. “If you make one kid think about it, you can save one life.”
ccarlisle@temple-telegram.com
