The Puget Sound Partnership has canceled plans for an executive retreat, but will still be on the hook to pay about $8,500 for work done to plan the gathering, according to the consultant doing the work.
The Tacoma Tideflats-based state agency had signed a no-bid contract to pay $19,493 to Ross and Associates Environmental Consulting to help organize and manage the two-day retreat for seven managers, at consultants’ hourly rates as high as $217. That looked excessive to at least one state lawmaker, Sen. Mark Schoesler.
“These people are still kind of on a caviar mentality when rice and beans is the order of the day,” said Schoesler, a Republican from Ritzville in Eastern Washington.
He compared the deal to previous contract irregularities at the agency that were exposed by State Auditor Brian Sonntag’s investigators. But the partnership can now point to a clean bill of health received Thursday from Sonntag’s office, which looked at the agency’s follow-up measures and declared them adequate.
“It validates everything that we’re saying: We’ve addressed all the problems from the beginning days of the partnership,” partnership spokesman Michael Grayum said.
RETREAT CANCELED
The agency’s plans for its first leadership retreat were postponed at least twice because of scheduling conflicts and finally canceled effective today. With an emergency session of the Legislature starting Nov. 28, Grayum said officials just ran out of time to meet.
He said the cancellation had nothing to do with budget concerns. The event would have helped set the agency’s direction and was a priority for new executive director Gerry O’Keefe, Grayum said. Original director David Dicks resigned in December to take a job at the University of Washington.
The consulting firm worked for two months on preparation, said its chief financial officer, Michelle Day.
The contract called for consultants to be paid an average of $162 an hour for labor costs including interviewing staff and outside “stakeholders” before the conference, preparing materials, “facilitating” the meeting and doing follow-up work. The hourly rates are the same charged to other government agencies that hire the firm, Day said.
Grayum said that work won’t go to waste, as consultants would still report on what they heard in interviews about what the agency should be doing. “They’re still going to deliver a product,” he said. “It’s just going to be in a different format.”
BUDGET DECISIONS
The amount of money involved is small in the 40-employee agency’s overall spending or even in its outlays to Seattle-based Ross, which holds a $595,000 contract to help develop Puget Sound cleanup strategy.
But it highlights a debate that could emerge in the Legislature over whether the partnership and other environmental agencies are taking their share of budget hits.
Schoesler says they are not. Increases in federal funding more than offset the last round of state cuts, and the senator noted everything in the agency’s $15.8 million budget comes from taxpayers somewhere.
Gov. Chris Gregoire has proposed another 10 percent cut in state general-fund spending on the agency in her latest spending plan, on top of a 15 percent cut to the partnership’s funding in the current state general-fund budget. Grayum called it a “shoestring budget” to begin with.
He said the agency’s work has paid off financially by helping the state pull down more federal Environmental Protection Agency money to address Puget Sound pollution. One kind of EPA money that started to trickle out in 2006, with $3 million for the region over two years, skyrocketed to an average of $32 million a year after the partnership was created in 2007.
The EPA took notice of Sonntag’s 2010 findings of contract irregularities and last month demanded a refund of $126,000, including for a contract signed retroactively after the meetings where the work took place. Federal officials also found consultant fees that exceeded an EPA cap on hourly rates but decided not to recoup them. The cap is now $74.50 an hour.
Those findings came after state auditors found the partnership tried to pay law firm K&L Gates $19,999, which they saw as an attempt to avoid requirements that no-bid contracts of $20,000 or more be advertised in a newspaper in addition to the online posting required for smaller awards. The firm was eventually paid more than $51,000, auditors found.
Schoesler sees the canceled retreat contract, at $507 less than the $20,000 threshold, as a similar attempt to avoid wider advertising. He called it part of a pattern of “sweetheart deals.”
Grayum says that wasn’t the intent. Because of the consultants’ previous work, he said, they know everyone involved in trying to clean up the Sound and had the “credibility” to do the work. “It was done completely on the up-and-up,” he said.
Jordan Schrader: 360-786-1826
jordan.schrader@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/politics
Twitter: @Jordan_Schrader
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