Good
Morning
By Tony Doris
New contract, same old problem
Here we go again: It's contract-award season in Miami-Dade, time for county commissioners to hand out the goodies.
This time we
re giving away rights to sell advertising space on 3,785 bus-stop benches around the county. It's a five-year contract with an option for another five, at the county's discretion. On one side, we have an experienced company with a solid track record around the country and locally, ranked far and away the best by county staff on the other, a new company with minimal experience, ranked dead last - bust which has excellent political connections.
This being Miami-Dade County, all bets are off
The top-ranked company is Gateway Outdoor Advertising. Gateway's bid promises the county 30 percent of its ad sales, and guarantees the county a minimum of $330,000 a year. Under the previous contract, the county never made more than $264,000 a year. Gateway has been handling the county's bus, rail and people-mover advertising since winning that contract in 1992. It's a 62 year old company based in New Jersey, with a local office in Hialeah. It has contracts for bus-bench and other transit advertising from Santa Monica to Detroit to Jacksonville.
It got behind in payments to the county in another Miami-Dade contract, at least partly due to Hurricane Andrew, but those debts have long since been paid.
The county selection committee for the bus-bench contract has ranked it first among three contenders, with a score of 983 points out of a possible 1,200.
The second ranked company, Triumph Outdoor Florida L.P. scored 674 points.
Premier Media limped into third place with 582 points. Its bid offers to pay the county a slightly higher percent-age of ad revenues than Gateway, but guarantees only $264,200 a year.
Premier was only incorporated on Jan. 13, 1998 - the day the county commission voted to put the contract out to bid.
But as my colleague Brett Graff wrote last November, Premier ranked high in one respect; the number of connected individuals in on its action.
The company president is Alex Fernandez, a former executive assistant to then-county commissioner Bruce Kaplan. Premier's vice president and treasurer is Alma Gomez, wife of lobbyist Fausto Gomez. To be Fair, Fernandez and Gomez have worked in advertising, but the selection committee ranked their team's experience low as a whole. Fernandez declined to comment on behalf of the company, saying the bid competition was still under way.
Also joining Premier in the bid are BBKIMeka Group, co-managed by Herman Echevarria, former president of the Hialeah City Council and an ally of Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas; and Tenusa Inc., a landscape management firm partly owned by Peter Bofill, husband of the executive assistant to county commission Chairwomen Gwen Margolis. Not that Gateway was without its lobbyists, chief among them Dusty Melton, a longtime power player in the county, as well as Tom Carlos, also an influential lawyer/lobbyist in Miami-Dade. But don't forget: Gateway also had a superior bid, and a track record. A formal bid protest by Premier, alleging improprieties, got rejected by a hearing officer. The county manager's recommendation to award the contract to Gateway was originally on the agenda for the commission's Jan 21 meeting.
But the night before the meeting, County manager Merrett Stierheim's s staff gets handed a legislative analysis by one of the researchers assigned by the commission to do fact-finding on agenda items. It's a seven-page report, chock-full of unanswered questions-pointed questions that strongly hint that county staff diverged from standard procedures in their evaluation.
Stierheim pulled his contract recommendation off the agenda to give his staff time to respond to the report. "We just got blindsided with it," he told me.
The report concludes with 10 questions that legislative assistant Vincent Grande
(Among bidders for the bus-bench advertising contract, Premier Media was a distant third. It was incorporated on 13 months ago, but has a number of connected individuals in on its action)
apparently put in the r report because he didn't have time to answer them himself The last ones; "has Gateway paid back the county all the delinquent amounts it owed the county, as it relates to their Metrobus/Rail Advertising Contracts with the county? Is Gateway's account currently paid up-to-date?"
The answer is, they've been paid up and current for years. But it's the questions that are suspect.
Maybe the legislative assistant is a hard-working stickler for details.
"Grande told me that, as a legislative assistant to the commission, he is not allowed to talk to the media.) And maybe county staffers who handle contract selections should be held
to the fire to dot every "i" and cross every "t," lest a lobbyist for an unworthy bidder drive a truck through a minor procedural flaw.
But one could conclude that the questions raised here were suggested to Grande by a Premier operative hoping to color the process, or to provide cover for commissioners who might be inclined to favor their buddies at Premier, even if it meant costing taxpayers a few dollars.
Don't think that could happen? Does the word "BellSouth" do anything for you? How about "luggage carts"?
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