When Dania Beach officials set out to bolster the list of engineering firms they could call on when needed, they made a series of grave errors that exposed the city to potential litigation, the Broward Inspector General’s Office says.
They also broke state Sunshine Laws, violated their own city policies and ignored a state law that local governments are required to follow when soliciting for engineering services, says a report from Inspector General John Scott.
The city’s bid review committee held two meetings outside the public eye in September 2016, gathering in private in a conference room at City Hall. Their conversations went unrecorded and no minutes were taken while they ranked firms competing to win city contracts.
And somehow, in a mystery that even investigators at the Broward Inspector General’s Office can’t solve, they in some cases snubbed higher-ranked firms in favor of lower-ranked companies. The way things went behind closed doors gives the appearance that the process was vulnerable to favoritism and abuse, the agency said.
The ranking process was so flawed that two firms were chosen to do work for which they had not applied, Scott’s report says.
Commissioner Bill Harris said he was not happy to learn staff had ignored protocol.
“I was stunned,” he said. “I thought we had more trustworthy people handling things.”
Dania Beach did not post notices about the meetings — in violation of the state’s Sunshine Law that requires government officials to meet in the open.
So now, the only people who can shed light on what went down were the people in that conference room — and all but one say they can’t remember all the details.
The former CRA director, one of the four who sat on the bid review committee, now lives out of state and declined to be interviewed by investigators with Scott’s office.
Another, the public works director, has lost his job. So has the city engineer who helped oversee the bid process.
City Manager Ana Garcia, who took the reins in March and was not in charge when the misconduct occurred, says she plans to start all over and redo the bids.
“We are going to make sure it’s done the right way,” she said Monday. “Clearly we weren’t doing things right. You want to be as transparent as possible always.”
Garcia also plans to hire a procurement manager to help avoid problems going forward.
Brad Kaine, the former public works director, declined to comment Monday.
Ronald Navarro, the former city engineer, could not be reached for comment.
Dania Beach heard from 33 firms after issuing a bid in June 2016 for architectural, surveying, landscape architecture and engineering consulting services to create a list of consultants to use as needed.
In October 2016, the city commission approved the committee’s ranking and authorized the city manager to execute an agreement with 15 selected firms. Since that time, Dania Beach has spent $799,000 on engineering and similar professional services.
Under city policy, the bid review committee should have included the assistant city manager or the finance director. Instead, it was comprised of the public works director, purchasing manager, community services director and CRA director.
The committee changed the ranking criteria mid-stream without notifying respondents in violation of state law, the report said.
Kimley-Horn & Associates was ranked the highest in five categories but wasn’t awarded any contracts. Miller Legg ranked in the top three in each of the five categories it applied for, but also came up empty.
The Inspector General’s Office found 21 instances where nine firms scored in the top three of a given category but did not make the contract list, while others with lower scores did. Only four of those nine firms were awarded contracts.
Kaine told investigators the committee chose firms it felt were a “better fit” for the city, regardless of rank.
Kaine said “some of us” had negative experiences with Kimley-Horn, but his scores show he gave Kimley-Horn the second highest score of all 33 respondents.
Navarro was the only person who admitted to any bias against Kimley-Horn, the report said.
Navarro advised Kaine of his bias against three firms and told him he did not want to take part in the selection. He was in the room for the discussion but did not join in, he told investigators. He was there to tabulate the scores, he said.
When investigators asked Navarro why firms with the highest scores were not recommended for contracts, he had this answer: He did not know.
“A most disturbing aspect of this procurement was that evaluation committee members, after scoring and ranking respondents, discussed and decided which firms should receive contracts based on whether they were a better fit for the city,” the Inspector General’s report says. “This was in disregard for the committee’s efforts to score, tally and rank respondents and rendered the process subjective and vulnerable to favoritism and abuse.”
Susannah Bryan can be reached at sbryan@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4554. Find her on Twitter @Susannah_Bryan.