A laundry vendor whose work for migrant-aid program Casa Alitas was terminated in May, due to a conflict of interest, is owned by the mother of Casa Alitas’ now-departed director, Pima County leaders confirmed Thursday.
The vendor was operating without a contract, was over-charging for services and was hired without a competitive-bid process, the Arizona Daily Star reported last month.
The family connection was first reported on Thursday by The New Republic, which said Amado Laundry Service, based in Amado, is owned by Irene A.G. Piña, the mother of former Casa Alitas director Diego Piña Lopez.
Amado invoiced nearly $412,000 in charges for laundry services provided to Tucson’s Casa Alitas, a program of nonprofit Catholic Community Services, before the nonprofit terminated the vendor relationship, The New Republic reported.
Amado Laundry Service did provide the commissioned services to Casa Alitas, but at a higher rate than competitors would have charged, Elena Dwyre, Catholic Community Services CEO, told the Arizona Daily Star on Thursday.
Piña Lopez and his supervisor, Teresa Cavendish, who was operations director at Catholic Community Services, both resigned from their roles in May when an internal review uncovered the conflict of interest and “procurement concerns.”
County Supervisor Steve Christy said the incident raises questions about both Catholic Community Service’s practices and Pima County’s oversight of federal dollars, which pay for Pima County’s migrant-aid response.
“My first response is maybe it’s symptomatic of a bigger problem,” he said Thursday. “Are we going to find out more inappropriate activities with taxpayer money? It’s certainly very troubling to me.”
A county review of Catholic Community Services’ reimbursement requests found no other procurement concerns, Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher told the Board of Supervisors Thursday. “If any other financial discrepancies are found at any time, they will be reported to our federal funder,” she wrote in a memo.
Dwyre said the Catholic agency sought to be as transparent as possible once it discovered the procurement problems.
“Our intention was never to hide anything. We owe it to our donors, to the public, to our partners with Pima County, who have always been fantastic to work with,” she said Thursday. “Sometimes it takes situations like this to take a step back and look at things, and we did, and we came out much stronger than we were. But that’s no indication that our systems were flawed; thanks to our system we had in place, we were able to discover this conflict of interest.”
Cavendish did not respond to the Star’s request for comment on Thursday, and Piña Lopez declined to comment.
Once she learned of the contracting concerns, Lesher said she immediately reported it to both the county Board of Supervisors in a May 17 memo, and to the federal government, which funds the region’s migrant-aid program. The memo did not disclose the vendor’s family relationship to Piña Lopez.
“It is disappointing, and my guess is it’s disappointing for many people involved,” Lesher said Thursday about the contracting issue. “We’ve always hoped we set a gold standard for how this function can be handled. It’s very disappointing that anything would cause anyone to doubt any aspect of this.”
Lesher said the county has a “significant” responsibility as the fiscal agent for the migrant-aid effort, which has been run “in accordance with all appropriate rules, regulations and laws. In this case, as soon as it came to our attention that there was a problem we notified all the appropriate parties.”
The county also immediately halted payment on invoices to Amado Laundry Service, but the county had already reimbursed Catholic Community Services more than $347,000 in federal funds for those laundry services, she said.
Amado Laundry Service first registered as an LLC with the Arizona Corporation Commission in May 2023, but it began billing Casa Alitas in March 2023, The New Republic reported.
Pima County has been the fiscal agent for the region’s migrant-aid effort, tasked with receiving and distributing federal funds, since 2019. Since then the county has received about $93 million in federal funding for food and sheltering services, transportation to shelters and airports or bus stations, and other expenses.
Since 2014 Catholic Community Services has provided aid services to migrants in Tucson, a role that scaled up dramatically as the number of migrant arrivals here soared, particularly in 2023.
The Star hasn’t yet received a response to its July 10 public records request seeking details on the procurement problems and any available results of the County Attorney Office’s inquiry. Lesher said she’s pushing the County Attorney’s Office to complete its review of the requested documents as soon as possible.
“It was a bad decision”
Casa Alitas volunteer Joy Tucker told the Star on Thursday that she recalls Casa Alitas struggling to find a laundry-services vendor in Tucson in early 2023. That prompted Piña Lopez to suggest his mother’s service as an option to his supervisor, Cavendish, Tucker said.
“The service happened to be his mother. He passed it on to his supervisor with the expectation that his supervisor would follow the proper channels, and she didn’t, which is unfortunate,” Tucker said.
Dwyre of Catholic Community Services said the vendor problems came as a surprise to agency leadership.
“I can’t say what they were thinking at that given time, but I don’t see any intention of committing any fraud,” she said. “I always saw them being incredibly mission-driven, mission-focused, doing whatever was needed for the individuals we served. It was a bad decision.”
Tucker, who has volunteered with Casa Alitas since 2018, said she faults Catholic Community Services’ accounting department for its lack of guidance for both staff and volunteers who were tasked with ordering from vendors.
“Here I am a volunteer, purchasing food, and I was given carte blanche to order whatever was needed,” she said. “There was no guidance on expenditures and I think a lot of it had to do with their accounting department,” which has experienced a lot of turnover.
In July Catholic Community Services took on a reduced role in the local migrant-aid response, stepping back from operations at the 650-bed Drexel Center to focus on the 140-bed “Welcome Center” on East Ajo Way, which will continue to use the name “Casa Alitas.” The nonprofit has narrowed its focus to migrant families with children under 10, and other vulnerable people, such as pregnant women.
Dwyre said the change was in the works before the contract irregularities were discovered, and is unrelated to the procurement issues.
Pima County contracted with for-profit AMI Expeditionary Healthcare, which provides crisis logistical and health-care support worldwide, to take over the Drexel Center’s operations.
Supervisor Christy said that $2.7 million contract with AMI Expeditionary Healthcare was never reviewed by county supervisors because it was considered an “emergency procurement,” which he called an “excuse.”
“They shouldn’t be treated as an NGO, as a not-for-profit,” Christy said. “They’re in it to make a buck, and I think something of that nature would have been a very good opportunity to be brought before the board for discussion, and it never was.”
Dwyre said that serving the migrant community has never been about profit for Catholic Community Services.
“Migrant services are not a financial opportunity for Catholic Community Services,” Dwyre said. “They are central to our mission of providing help, creating hope and serving all. ... We continue our commitment to serve the most vulnerable and we are proud to do so.”
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