No juicy deal for URS
JUST AS IT appeared San Francisco was moving away from giving
Bechtel Corp. control over the huge process of rebuilding the
city's water system, another politically powerful firm has sidetracked
proper bidding processes and is poised to win a lucrative deal
on the water project. As Matthew Hirsch reports on page 16, the San
Francisco Public Utilities Commission is slated May 27 to award a $4
million contract to URS Corp., an engineering firm owned in part by
Richard Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
The contract, for preliminary work on the reconstruction of Calaveras
Dam, will put URS on the inside track for further juicy contracts on
the dam project, which will cost at least $150 million.
The way the deal went down demonstrates the continuing problems with
the city's contracting procedures and the ongoing corruption in the
administration of Mayor Willie Brown. It offers yet another clear and
convincing reason why Brown's SFPUC can't be trusted to handle the massive
task of renovating the Hetch Hetchy water system without constant
monitoring and oversight.
Here's what happened: Long before the SFPUC put out a request for proposals
on the dam reconstruction, URS was working behind the scenes
with SFPUC staffers. The company wrote a memo on what the scope of work
should look like – and the SFPUC's final request for proposals
included the exact language, word for word, from that memo. Then after
several companies bid on the deal, the evaluating team chose the URS
proposal – even though it wasn't the cheapest – in part because
it demonstrated the best "understanding" of the project.
The Bechtel deal set off alarms all over town: the SFPUC had given
the notorious private firm (which set off riots after it privatized
a water system in Bolivia and is now headed for a major role in rebuilding
Iraq) far too much control over the beginning stages of the $4
billion public works project. Bechtel was not only attempting to overbill
the city; the firm was also doing work that should have been done by
city employees, at a fraction of the cost. In essence, the SFPUC was
on the road to privatizing the Hetch Hetchy rebuild.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has virtually put an end to
that deal – but now URS (which also has juicy Pentagon contracts
in Iraq) seems to be headed down the same path.
The SFPUC should reject this contract and rebid it, fairly – and
the supervisors should hold a new round of hearings on how the Brown
administration is handling the Hetch Hetchy project.
On a larger level, the supervisors ought to ask for a report from the
budget analyst summarizing all of the money the city has lost over the
past eight years to sole-source contracts, bidding scandals, cost overruns,
and other problems with private contractors. The candidates for mayor
all need to explain how they'll clean up this expensive cesspool of
political influence, which has perhaps been the most pervasive scandal
of the Brown administration – and a full accounting of the money
the mayor has lost would be a good way to start.
