The Broward School District bungled its latest effort to find outside managers to take over its troubled construction program, an audit has found, raising questions about how the district will ensure more than 100 school projects don’t face further delays.
Superintendent Howard Hepburn plans to ask the School Board to vote Tuesday to reject all bids received from companies vying to oversee the district’s construction projects, following the report drafted by Chief Auditor John Rhodes, district spokesman John Sullivan told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“The Chief Auditor’s report identified concerns with how the procurement process was conducted, including deviations from established procedures,” Sullivan said. “The Superintendent is continuing to review the report to determine appropriate next steps. That review will guide any corrective actions to strengthen oversight and ensure future procurements fully comply with District policy and state law. Personnel matters will be addressed appropriately once the review is complete.”
School Board members are now considering taking emergency actions for the construction program, which has been plagued by years of delays and cost overruns.
The audit report, released Tuesday, found that district staff selected vendors without ensuring they were qualified and engaged in a rushed process that led to missteps.
These actions may have unfairly affected potential vendors and limited the pool of applicants, the audit found.
“Planning deficiencies led to a heightened sense of urgency that may have contributed to procedural irregularities and solicitation language that may have been unclear to staff and confusing or discouraging to potential vendors,” the report said.
The district was seeking vendors to help it complete about 100 long-delayed projects that are part of the district’s 2014 SMART bond referendum, as well as some newer projects, such as a replacement building for Rickards Middle, the site of a 2021 roof collapse.
The poor management of the SMART bond referendum was the major focus of a statewide grand jury report completed in 2021 and released in 2022. That report prompted Gov. Ron DeSantis to remove and replace four School Board members. One of the deficiencies cited by the grand jury was a nine-month delay in getting the district’s first program manager to oversee the bond due to irregularities in the bidding and selection process.
District officials have said they need the help of outside companies because they don’t have enough staff with the needed expertise in their facilities department. The district has used two program managers to oversee construction in the past decade: CBRE Heery from 2015 to 2020 and AECOM from 2020 to present.
The district’s contract with AECOM expires Jan. 17, 2026, after 5½ years. District lawyers told School Board members multiple times this year that extensions beyond that time period are not allowed in most situations, and any replacement vendor must be competitively bid.
“If we were to change that now, that would be contrary to the competitive procurement where we set forth the material terms” on the 2020 solicitation, Assistant General Counsel Tom Cooney told the School Board on May 6. “We had three bidders at the time. Had they known they had an opportunity to go longer, they might have been presented differently. They might have been ranked differently. So it could get us into some hot water.”
But Cooney also said on May 6 that state law allows for some flexibility in times of an emergency, “which we’re not there. That isn’t to say in several months we might not be in the situation” where an emergency arises.
That time has come, Board member Allen Zeman told the Sun Sentinel, since it’s unlikely the district could complete a competitive bidding process before AECOM’s contract expires next month. So Zeman is proposing an emergency one-year extension of AECOM’s contract.
“Declare that you can’t live without it,” Zeman said. “We have to look really hard at our ability to build anything. To me, that means you’re probably going to do a 12-month bridge based on an emergency, and you’re going to use that bridge to get to substantial completion on as many projects as possible.”
Several school board members requested the audit after receiving complaints about the vendor selection process.
“I will work with the chief auditor and send every document that we have to whatever investigator because I know the team hasn’t done anything nefarious,” Hepburn said at a Nov. 12 School Board meeting. “We always take a thorough look whenever any board member brings concerns to us.”
School Board members had voiced concern in April that they could face troubles once AECOM’s contract expires Jan. 17, especially if a vendor bidding on the new contract filed a formal bid protest, alleging the process was unfair. The district would not be able to award a new contract until the protest was either dropped or ruled upon by a judge, under state procurement rules.
“If we’re in a situation where the AECOM contract is expiring in January, we don’t have a contract to approve and we can’t extend it beyond January, where does that leave the board?” Board member Sarah Leonardi asked Chief Operating Officer Wanda Paul at an April 22 meeting.
“I think that we have sufficient time even if there is a protest,” Paul responded. “Our intent is to learn from what’s not happened correctly in the past and to improve the program.”
Jennifer Andreu, executive director of procurement, told the School Board at the same meeting that her office planned to advertise the solicitation in June and bring it to the School Board for award in August. She said her office was trying to write the language of the request for qualifications “very tight” to avoid a possible bid protest.
Leonardi was not persuaded.
“I think a lot of time we need to be planning and expecting the worst, and it doesn’t feel like we’re doing this right now,” she said at the April 22 meeting. “I don’t want to be sitting at this table in January of 2026 with no options because our hands are tied, and this has happened over and over again.”
School Board members asked district staff members to bring the solicitation to the board for review and approval before it went out, but that didn’t happen, the audit states. It went out to bid on Aug. 6.
Unlike in 2020, when the district sought just one program manager to oversee all the work in the district’s bond program, this time, district officials decided they needed multiple firms that could manage different projects, facilities employees told auditors.
Some parts of the district’s solicitation said the district was looking for “no less than two” vendors, while other parts said they were looking for only two. The district selected three.
“The inconsistency in the solicitation language regarding the number of intended awardees may have negatively impacted vendor participation, particularly among smaller or less established firms,” the report said. “If three vendors were being sought, it may have encouraged more vendor participation.”
Three program manager vendors submitted bids: AECOM, Jacobs and EXP. But when bids were opened on Sept. 9, none met the financial requirements set by the district, which required a certain ratio of assets to liabilities, the audit said.
Cooney told the auditors he at first did not see how the district could proceed. But after speaking with Paul, Cooney agreed to engage with an external law firm, which determined the ratio was not a serious enough issue to require bids to be rejected.
The auditor’s office learned that the district listed the same financial requirements in the 2020 solicitation, received three bids from companies that also didn’t meet it and made the same decision then to waive the requirements as a technicality.
Auditors “found it concerning” that neither the procurement nor facilities department “reassessed the appropriateness of this requirement, particularly given that the previous solicitation also resulted in a waiver and only generated three proposals at the time.”
The district uses a group called the Qualification Selection Evaluation Committee, or QSEC, to evaluate, score and rank proposals from vendors. When the group met on Oct. 15, Cooney recommended the committee pass motions not only to waive the financial requirements but also waive the scoring and ranking of proposers and direct staff to negotiate with all three vendors.
Auditors “found it troubling that the QSEC chose to direct staff to negotiate agreements with all three proposing firms without evaluating the submitting firms based on their qualifications, project approaches, and ability to deliver the required services,” the report said.
One of the motions referred to the “School Board Administration’s desire to enter into agreements with all three proposers,” the audit said.
“The QSEC members … interviewed were not clear who exactly ‘desired’ all three proposers to be recommended but they had not witnessed anything being waived before as a member of QSEC,” the report said. “They recognized there was a sense of urgency for QSEC to proceed because the Assistant General Counsel was at the meeting to present the motions.”
Cooney told auditors that Paul was the administrator who wanted to proceed with the three vendors, the audit said. Hepburn told auditors that “he was not involved in that decision.”
Sullivan said the district is now making plans on how to proceed.
“The District is evaluating interim operational options to ensure construction projects continue without disruption,” Sullivan said. “This action reflects the Superintendent’s commitment to transparency, accountability and the integrity of District’s procurement processes.”