SPECIAL REPORT: Second of a two-day series
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Pima County's convoluted record-keeping makes it hard for even county workers to track construction spending, but one trend is clear: Those who contributed most to supervisors' political campaigns snared the most work.
An Arizona Daily Star analysis of roughly 300 county contracts shows that tax money is spent on contracts that have expired or run out of money, consultants frequently ignore county billing standards, and there is no central record keeping for the $323 million spent on roads and sewers during the past five years.
Former procurement officer Mike Studer likened the county's system to "a husband and wife writing checks on the same account, and neither one knows what the other is spending until you go to the ATM and suddenly you're overdrawn."
While supervisors and other county officials deny politics and contracts are linked, memos scattered throughout files reviewed by the Arizona Daily Star point to a keen awareness of connections in the distribution of county work, with references to "politically sensitive" contract awards and to consultants who failed to support bond elections.
"Pima County is run a lot like Chicago in terms of patronage," said longtime Tucson consultant John Lynch of GLHN Archi-
tects & Engineers, 2939 E. Broadway.
"Firms that I know of that have difficulty getting work with other government entities seem to fare very well with the county. If they struggle to get work anywhere else, why do they do so well at Pima County?"
William Carroll, vice president of Stantec Consulting Inc., 4911 E. Broadway, said that when he doesn't get a job with the city of Tucson, he usually can look through proposals and see why the competition scored higher.
"At the county, I don't necessarily feel the top firms are the best qualified."
Collins-Piña in spotlight
With $9.25 million in county business during the past five years, Collins-Piña tops the list of about 50 engineering firms that get county work.
Collins-Piña, purchased in recent years by Tetra Tech, also tops the list of political contributors during the period, with employees giving $8,500 - mostly to the Democratic board majority.
Collins-Piña originally agreed to discuss its relationship with the county for this story. The company canceled the interview last week, on the same day supervisors Chairwoman Sharon Bronson scheduled a last-minute board discussion of contracting procedures.
But county records speak about the lengths staff members have gone to in getting work for Collins-Piña, 33 N. Stone Ave.
In 2000, the county's waste-water management staff decided it wanted Collins-Piña to do more design work on a storm-water detention basin near Kino Sports Park.
Collins-Piña already had exhausted all the money in its contract, but county officials made a suggestion for keeping the company on the job: Filter the additional money through another contractor.
A work order was issued for GLHN, with instructions to hire Collins-Piña as subconsultants.
County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said he didn't recall the project, but that practice is inappropriate.
Another firm closer to the bottom of the giving-and-getting lists saw its fortunes change after stepping up political contributions to supervisors.
Engineering and Environmental Consultants, a Tucson firm at 4625 E. Fort Lowell Road, teamed with the Phoenix office of Sverdrup Civil in 1998 in an effort to oversee construction of the massive $70 million Ina Road sewage treatment plant expansion.
Under the county selection process, in which a panel of county and outside experts rates companies based on work history and staff skill, the EEC/Sverdrup team ranked first, with 290 points, and was in line for $1.2 million in work.
Three other firms were supposed to get work too, according to an original county worksheet on the project.
But when a revised recommendation later surfaced, fourth-ranked RS Engineering - 20 points behind Sverdrup but second only to Collins-Piña on the five-year list of political contributions - won the award. EEC/Sverdrup got nothing.
What happened? A handwritten note in the files indicates County Administrator Huckelberry spoke with the Board of Supervisors before the final vote.
Huckelberry said last week that he didn't recall the contract details. Jon Schladweiler of the Wastewater Management Department said there was a concern Sverdrup wasn't local.
Until that point, EEC had only sporadic work worth half a million dollars with the county. Since boosting contributions to $1,200 in the last election, it has landed $4 million in county contracts.
Chuck Hollingsworth, EEC founder, said political contributions rose because business improved and he took on more partners, who gave money.
Hollingsworth also said he and other engineers give money to charities popular with county officials, including Democratic Supervisor Dan Eckstrom and former waste-water director George Brinsko. One such charity is the Pio Decimo Center, 848 S. Seventh Ave., which provides social and educational services to South Side residents.
The contributions aren't an attempt to win favor, Hollingsworth said, but are a way to build friendships and foster awareness.
"A lot of the money we gave to that charity in South Tucson . . . they've got the Eckstrom and Brinsko connection who know a lot of people in my business," he said.
Consultant Robert Suarez of RS Engineering, 2445 N. Tucson Blvd., echoed that view, saying that establishing relationships with government is what he gets from contributions - not favored treatment.
Suarez, and other consultants interviewed, said they don't give as much to City Council candidates because they don't ask.
During the past 10 years, engineers have given four times as much money to county incumbents as to City Council members, even though there are two more seats at the city level.
Bob Brittain of Johnson-Brittain & Assoc., 378 N. Main Ave., said that's because city contracts are based on staff evaluations of who's most qualified. "The mayor and council stay out of it," he said.
"The supervisors you give contributions to, they know you gave," Brittain said. "And if you don't give, they know that, too."
Adds Lynch of GLHN, "I can tell you, City Council members won't take calls from consultants whining about the fact they don't get work."
At the county, though, politicians do.
Eckstrom connection
Two contractors with work-related ties to Eckstrom succeeded in bucking staff rankings and recommendations to win engineering work.
Steve Corrales got a no-bid contract in 1995 to design the La Cholla-Rudasill intersection after inquiries from Eckstrom, with whom he had worked before Eckstrom joined the board. The award came despite e-mails from transportation officials predicting Corrales would have problems completing the job.
Eckstrom said it was his right to ask for an explanation of why Corrales wasn't getting work, but he said he never demanded a contract for him.
A subsequent memo says Corrales did, indeed, have trouble completing the assignment.
"What has happened on the previous projects by this firm is that there have been serious deficiencies in their designs, and because of schedule pressures to get the projects done, we have paid him off and taken over and finished the projects ourselves," Brooks Keenan, then deputy transportation director, wrote to one of his staffers.
Still, five months later, the Corrales contract increased, and at the direction of Huckelberry, Corrales was excluded from a countywide freeze on capital spending projects.
Huckelberry, who called Corrales "the epitome of a small businessman," said staff opinions of contractors can be subjective and might not have been shared by everyone.
Finally, in 1997, the Transportation Department let his contract lapse.
"The consensus in design is that there are no projects that he can do (or that they would want him to do). Maybe it's time to just LET GO," procurement staffer Studer wrote to Keenan.
Corrales says now that he never knew the county staff was unhappy with his work and points to a 1997 award he received from public works colleagues for a city job he did along Irvington Road.
Not only did the county never reprimand him by phone or mail, he said, but his contract kept getting renewed.
Son Charles Corrales, vice president of the firm, said the company had been having trouble getting work and put in a call. "If you have a pothole in the road in front of your home, you call your councilman or supervisor, too," he said.
The Corraleses said they are relatively happy with the county process but are having less success getting work with the city and state.
In the second case, BKS Engineers - a firm that for years hired Eckstrom as a consultant and donates money to Democrats on the board - was one of four competitors for a $200,000 bridge project on Avra Valley Road.
Holben, Martin & White ranked No. 1 on the quality-assessment list, with 287 points - 24 more than fourth-ranked BKS, 2834 E. Grant Road.
A county Transportation Department memo said it had had problems with only one of the four applicants - BKS - noting the company struggled to meet a time line for another bridge project. In fact, plans for that earlier project were submitted so late that the county lost out on federal bridge replacement funding that year.
While the Avra Valley project went to Holben, Martin, a second $200,000 project - never advertised - was handed to BKS.
BKS owner Vinod Sanan declined to comment.
Departmental disconnects
A review of county files also reveals a thread of interdepartmental disconnects that's as prevalent as the political connections.
The files are rife with examples of staff overspending contracts because, they complain, departments with differing responsibilities for the same contract had little way of knowing what another department was doing.
To get a complete picture of each contract requires a visit to the procurement office to see who got a job, then departmental administrative offices to track change orders, then project engineers to follow progress and finally finance staffers to see how much was paid.
Even then, a complete record isn't always available.
Aggravating the problem, the county often hires consultants to oversee construction on projects, and those consultants are allowed to use their own widely varying standards for communicating with the county.
In one example, then-procurement officer Roseanne Sweeney was trying to figure out what to do with a $2,266 consultant invoice for a Parks Department project that was submitted for payment under an expired Transportation Department contract.
"You guessed it - another consultant assignment I knew nothing about," the memo reads. Sweeney says in the memo that she was going to have to get the firm to resubmit under a current contract.
"Ho hum," she wrote. "Here we go again."
Here are some other examples from the files of the staff overspending contracts - or finding creative ways around the problem:
Losing track. In 2001, staff members lost track of how much money was left on an open-ended contract held by Catalina Engineering, prompting them to authorize $22,000 in added work for which there was no money.
Rather than admitting the error, they sought money for extra work with the explanation, "due to unforeseen design considerations."
More demolition. In 2001, a $109,000 contract to demolish eight houses in a right of way had to be more than doubled to $237,000 to cover the cost of demolishing yet another eight homes.
A procurement department memo complains the second set of homes should have been put out to bid, but it was being added to the old contract "to cover for their failure to include these houses in the first contract."
Shifting contracts. In 2000, the county attempted to cover a $142,000 shortfall in Southern Arizona Paving's 1997 annual road maintenance contract by applying the bills to a new contract issued to the company in 1999 for road work.
Internal memos say the shift was necessary because the earlier contract "had been continuously out of money. Before an amendment could pass, it was out of money again."
In 2000, staff members overshot a $100,000 contract by nearly 50 percent and had to ask the elected Board of Supervisors to cover a $48,000 shortfall for new work authorized along Silverbell Wash.
Twice in 1999, staffers tried to charge expenses to contracts that had long since expired - once for $1,999 and once for $7,000. In both cases, records show bills were quietly diverted to another contract the same companies held on another project.
In most cases, the board is stuck paying. In justifying the increases, the staff often tells board members that to withhold payment for work already done would expose the county to liability or would stop work on a project altogether.
Supervisors in the dark
Sometimes it's apparent that the Board of Supervisors doesn't know what's going on because it has to rely on questionable staff information.
In 1998, the county Wastewater Management Department solicited proposals for much-needed odor control improvements at the Roger Road sewage treatment plant. The selection panel ranked Cella Barr first with 86.5 points. Malcolm Pirnie, the next-closest, tallied 82.5 points.
But the recommendation sent to the board said only that Malcolm Pirnie got more first-place rankings than the competing firms, never mentioning that Cella Barr rated first overall. A separate section of the report listed Malcolm Pirnie as the No. 1-ranked firm, without revealing the actual scores.
Malcolm Pirnie was awarded the $400,000 contract, which ultimately grew to $775,400.
Supervisor Eckstrom said that heavy reliance on staffers proves supervisors have little control over who gets work.
"At this point, our system is pretty much driven by staff," Eckstrom said. "And for now, unless someone shows me otherwise, I trust them."
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Top contributors to supervisors
(Among 42 contracting firms, 1997-2002)
Consultant/ Contribution/ Rank/ County contracts/ Rank
Collins-Piña $8,515 1 $9.2 million 1
RS Engineering $7,420 2 $6.1 million 4
DJA Engineering $7,180 3 $6.8 million 3
BKS Engineers $4,280 4 $1.4 million 15
MMLA $4,015 5 $5.7 million 5
Camp, Dresser $1,845 6 $8.6 million 2
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On StarNet: For a detailed list of transportation, water and sewer projects awarded by the city of Tucson and Pima County from 1995 to 2001, see our expanded online coverage at azstarnet.com/specialreports
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The money
contributions to officeholders
$53,042
pima county supervisors (10 years, five seats)
$13,758
Tucson City Council members (10 years, seven seats)
contributions supporting bond-election campaigns
$73,750
Pima County (one election, 1997)
$32,790
City of Tucson (two elections, 1994, 2000)
