Richmond's commonwealth's attorney has agreed to look into a faulty school system procurement process involving the assignment of a $291,080 contract for design work for an elevator at William Fox Elementary School.
The school system and the company that won the contract mutually canceled that deal a month ago after the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported problems with the way the work was solicited and awarded. School Board member Carol A.O. Wolf called for an outside investigation of the process, but the school system decided to use its internal auditor to investigate.
Commonwealth's Attorney Mike Herring confirmed yesterday that he had received a copy of the school audit and that he determined it merited a review. The goal is to "determine if a person was intentionally trying to circumvent the statutes and was hoping to enjoy some pecuniary gain, or whether it was just a case of laziness and stupidity," Herring said. "If you've read the audit, you know it's clearly one or the other."
The school system's audit was an investigation of the process in which a contractor was hired to design an addition to house an elevator at Fox Elementary. That work would bring the school into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, helping satisfy a court-supervised settlement over handicap accessibility in city schools.
A Times-Dispatch review of the Fox contract revealed several inconsistencies with the Virginia Public Procurement Act, including a lack of competitive negotiation, selection criteria written specific to a single company and the presence of evaluators with ties to the winning bidder.
That audit confirmed those findings and reported others, including an attempt to assign the contract without opening the process to other companies and sloppiness in writing the official request for proposals when it was determined the job had to be advertised.
"We've spent the better part of a year dealing with procurement issues," said Wolf, referring to the April release of a report from the city's auditor that detailed more than 100 problems with school system procurement and accounts-payable functions. "In order to have the credibility we need, we can't police ourselves."
Since the assignment of the Fox contract, the school system has hired a new procurement director. He immediately began instituting changes, including the release yesterday of a list of six major changes to procurement. Those include mandating a seven-person team of evaluators for future proposals -- up from the current three -- and a formal conflict-of-interest form. If that form had been in place, at least two of the three people who evaluated the Fox proposals would have been disqualified.
Contact Zachary Reid at (804) 775-8179 or zreid@timesdispatch.com.
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