A shed is demolished at Buzzard Point, one of the sites where a local construction company failed to win an infrastructure contract. (Photo by Francis Chung)

A shed is demolished at Buzzard Point, one of the sites where a local construction company failed to win an infrastructure contract. (Photo by Francis Chung)

Another week, another apparent scandal involving D.C. government officials. This one gets a bit wonky, involving a city agency that isn’t often in the headlines, contract bids, and hundreds of pages of testimony before a D.C. Council committee.

Ahem, what’s the short version?

D.C.’s Department of General Services oversees construction projects—and the lucrative bids for them. Director Christopher Weaver abruptly and mysteriously resigned last August. Within two weeks, it came out that Weaver stepped down rather than fire two employees, as directed by City Administrator Rashad Young, who had recalibrated how DGS evaluated bids. A heavyweight local construction company that donated to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s campaign lost out on two contracts, and it appeared the administration wasn’t happy about it.

One of the employees filed a lawsuit, suing the city and Young for $10 million, saying he was “terminated in retaliation for failing to cooperate with [the Mayor’s office’s] efforts to award the contract” to a political donor and then “publicly defam[ed] and embarass[ed].”

Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, who oversees the D.C. Council committee with oversight of DGS, decided to look into the situation. “I wanted to see if there was anything improper, but I was also interested to report if there’s nothing improper,” Cheh tells DCist about her decision to open an investigation. “It’s not a good thing for the government for allegations to swirl around, that there’s a notion that improprieties are occurring.”

She held closed-door hearings totaling nearly 24 hours, keeping testimony sealed to protect the two fired employees. Then Cheh set about working up a committee report based on what they heard. She says she worked with the other councilmembers on reach a consensus, but after a lot of back and forth, it “proved to be more difficult than I would have hoped. Whether it was because members, or a member, really didn’t want the report to ever go out or because they really had such deep and abiding objections, I’m not really sure why.”

Cheh worked up her own report (“you’re not going to find a report that’s more footnoted,” she says), and moved to unseal it along with the testimony earlier this week.

So what did it find?

Essentially three things: someone in the city government likely leaked information to help Fort Myer, the administration of Muriel Bowser appears to have pressured DGS into making decisions that would help the construction company, and there is a widespread impression that Fort Myer has a favored status with the city government.

Here’s how The Post characterizes the findings:

The top appointed official in D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s administration took an “extraordinary” step of trying to appease one of the mayor’s largest campaign donors by urging city attorneys to quickly settle unresolved contract disputes between the District and his company, according to a report released Wednesday by the head of a D.C. Council committee. The action by D.C. City Administrator Rashad M. Young led to $4 million in taxpayer settlements with Fort Myer Construction, ending the city’s previous opposition to such payouts, according to the report.

Young also took the “unprecedented” step, according to the report, of directing Bowser’s head of contracting to more than double work set aside for minority-owned construction firms around a new Southeast practice facility for the Washington Wizards. That move was also “designed to benefit” Fort Myer Construction. At another point, an unidentified city official illegally shared confidential information to benefit Fort Myer Construction, the report said.

Here’s WAMU:

A report released Wednesday by D.C. Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) says that the D.C. government has for years worked in ways big, small and potentially illegal to grant a virtual most-favored status to construction firm Fort Myer, once again raising the prospect of “pay-to-play” in the lucrative market for city contracts.

it looks broadly at the long-running and cozy relationship between Fort Myer and the city’s government, one that has allowed the company to access millions of dollars worth of city contracts while returning the favor to elected officials and candidates in the form of campaign contributions.

Regarding the leak of confidential information to Fort Myer, Cheh says “if that’s a one off, that’s one thing, but who knows if that’s something that happens more frequently. If that happens more frequently, then that ought to be looked into.”

She also notes that even the current head of DGS, Greer Johnson Gillis, acknowledges the perception of the company’s cozy relationship to the government. When she served as a private consultant, Gillis testified, other consultants told her that they refrained from bidding when Fort Myer was involved because it was assumed the company would win.

And then there’s this: a lobbyist for Fort Myer threatened Ana Harvey, D.C.’s director of the Department of Small Local Business Development, not to work against them. “I already got rid of that f—– Weaver. Watch it,” the lobbyist told her, in Harvey’s account.

Well, that sounds not great. What’s the mayor doing about this?

In a word: nada. She called evidence of an illegal leak “a wild accusation” and said there was no reason to believe it’s true, in a brief interview with The Washington Post. Her chief of staff told the newspaper the day before that the report was “malarky.”

Here’s the administration’s full statement:

So what happens next?

The Council committee is done with its work, which Cheh noted was limited by their constraints as, well, a Council committee. Officials from the Inspector General’s office attended the hearings and they’ve said the office is reviewing the report, but it is unclear if the IG plans to open a full investigation.

Hm, it sure seems like we’ve been hearing about a lot scandals recently.

While none of them have risen to the level of completely damning, the Bowser administration hasn’t come across looking good in a number of recent headlines. There was the school lottery scandal, in which DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson allowed several members of the administration and other high-profile parents to bypass the system; technically it wasn’t illegal, but it raised all kinds of ethics hackles (the mayor has since enacted changes to avoid a repeat of the situation). Shortly thereafter, Bowser’s handpicked successor came under fire for a series of campaign finance irregularities (he’s appealing the fine). And then days later, the mayor’s own campaign was hit with $13,000 in fines for taking excessive contributions, including from several deep-pocketed developers (they’re paying it and moving on).

Here’s some more detail about how this DGS thing all went down, if you really want to get into it:

Cheh initially wanted to open an investigation with subpoena power, but ultimately didn’t because she had been promised cooperation by the executive branch, which the Ward 3 councilmember says she by-and-large got.

On the day of the vote to unseal the testimony, two members of the committee weren’t there (Brandon Todd was out of town attending an infrastructure forum, according to his spokesperson). Ward 2’s Jack Evans tried unsuccessfully to delay the vote, before voting not to unseal the documents. “There are individuals who could get unfairly hurt,” he argued. Committee member Charles Allen and Chairman Phil Mendelson (who sat in on the vote) joined Cheh in moving to make the information public.

Cheh says that the testimony was originally sealed to protect the fired employees, who didn’t object to it being unsealed.

The full cache of documents is available here.

Filed Under: bowser, department of general services, dgs, green team, scandal,