
Anson Stevens-Bollen
Two years after an internal audit found the city of Santa Fe’s procurement process in disarray, it appears top-level administrators still struggle with proper procedures.
This week, it took a stern reminder about New Mexico’s sunshine laws and the punishments for breaking them from the state’s leading government transparency group to force records out of the city that show how a multimillion-dollar contract was awarded for renovations at the airport.
In the end, the records, which city officials provided to SFR somewhat under duress, do not appear to show anything was amiss with the contract award to Albuquerque-based architectural firm Molzen Corbin and Associates for the airport on the city's Southside.
But gathering the information proved cumbersome.
SFR requested records related to the contract award on July 11 under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act. That gave the city until July 26 to provide them. At first, neither the city’s records custodian nor its Public Works director would say whether certain detailed records, which are required by city and state regulations, even existed.
A lengthy back-and-forth ensued, with several quizzical responses from the records custodian, Cynthia Whiting, and Regina Wheeler, the Public Works boss. Neither would answer questions about whether scoring sheets filled out by members of a city selection committee had been used, as is required under city and state rules, or whether they’d been destroyed.
That’s when the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government stepped in. Melanie Majors, the group’s executive director, learned of the stonewalling from SFR and dashed off a letter to Santa Fe officials.
“IPRA is not a set of rigid legal requirements, it represents the ‘public policy’ of the State of New Mexico,” Majors writes. “Page 53 of your own city code states that files for bids and proposals are public record. In addition, the proposal document provided to bidders has copies of the bid evaluations, the scoring sheets. This leads us to question why this record(s) would be misplaced or worse, destroyed. I am sure you are aware that there are penalties for noncompliance with IPRA and penalties for destruction of public records.”
That letter seemed to prompt the city to confirm the existence of the documents—and find them.
“Typically these scoring sheets are turned over to purchasing and become a part of their records,” city spokeswoman Lilia Chacon writes in an email Monday night, hours after SFR’s deadline. “In this case they were inadvertently left out, and today Airport Director Mark Baca located them in a physical file. This was an oversight and an accidental omission, and it took considerably longer to locate paper files than a computer search.”
Chacon’s assertion of an “oversight and an accidental omission” does not account for city officials’ repeated insistence that the records did not exist.
The scoring sheets, once they were eventually found and turned over to SFR, showed how the city’s four-member committee rated the five firms that bid for the contract issued in September for sweeping renovations at the Santa Fe Regional Airport in a variety of categories, including past experience, knowledge of local conditions and availability of resources.
Records initially turned over by the city only showed the committee’s total scores, but not how they arrived at their decision to choose Molzen Corbin.
Procurements were among the city’s procedures that came in for criticism in the 2017 “McHard Report,” which found significant problems in Santa Fe’s internal workings.
The city hired McHard Accounting Consulting LLC to do a fraud risk assessment. The firm found, among other deficiencies, that the city’s procurement practices were time-consuming, inefficient and did not lead to cost savings. City procedures were not aligned with the New Mexico State Purchasing Rules or the city’s own policy.
“The procurement practices likely lead to higher costs, and put the City at greater risk for fraud schemes and policy violations,” the report reads. Auditors pointed to a lack of training for staff and “needless RFPs [that] slow down the procurement process, and increase the likelihood of procurement policy violations, including potential fraud and kickbacks.”
SFR’s records request aimed to uncover documents showing exactly how the city’s selection committee chose Molzen Corbin for the contract, which is now worth $1,947,455.
The City Council approved about $1 million worth of airport work for Molzen Corbin in September. Councilors nearly doubled the contract on June 12, as SFR reported last month, after an unexpected windfall had come through a capital improvements bill signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in March that awarded $9.5 million to the airport project.
That money was on top of $10 million from federal and state sources.
Records eventually provided to SFR show Molzen Corbin beat out four other architectural firms for the work. Armstrong Consultants, Inc. came in a relatively close second, while the other three firms were disfavored by the selection committee, the records show.
Cost was not included as an evaluation criteria for the RFP because the city “anticipates the use of federal funds for the completion of this project,” city documents show.
However, city, state and federal funds flowed to Molzen Corbin under the original contract.
After being told the records did not exist, SFR persisted, pointing out that t he city code says files for proposals are public record and should include “evaluation forms.” The state also requires that after an award of a contract to a private company, the evaluation committee’s report and each proposal is considered public record.
Wheeler, who as the Public Works Department director oversees the Santa Fe Regional Airport, continued to insist that the city had nothing more to provide, writing in an email last week that she didn’t have “any additional information.”
After the refusal, SFR went to the Foundation for Open Government. Majors, the executive director, was immediately concerned about city officials’ inability or outright refusal to try and locate public records.
“It seems to be an example of stonewalling. In regards to the fact that they don’t have [the records] or they’re missing, that presents a more serious issue. Do the folks in that department need additional training so that they don’t violate a 40-year-old law?” came Majors’ reply. “This is a failure on the transparency front. It shouldn’t be tolerated.”