Thursday, November 09, 2017

ST. JOHNS COUNTY's ARDURRA GROUP, LLC CONTRACT; U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) Complaint Number C1806951



Filed today:
1. St. Johns County entered into a FEMA Hurricane Matthew remediation contract with ARDURRA GROUP, LLC without background investigation. http://www.sjccoc.us/minrec/agendas/2016/122016cd/12-20-16CON28.pdf SJC has admitted that it did no background investigation before hiring notorious "Spillionaire" company, Respondent ARDURRA. (See Respondent SJC's response to my Open Request No. 2017-595). ARDURRA has reportedly transferred controversial frontman CRAIG TAFARRO, JR.,, former St. Bernard, Louisiana Parish President, subject of ProPublica investigative stories. https://www.propublica.org/article/spillionaires-profiteering-mismanagement-in-the-wake-of-the-bp-oil-spill
2. Respondent ARDURRA hired contractors and subcontractors, including our former St. Johns County Assistant County Administrator JEREMY CAMERON, whom ARDURRA has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.
3. Respondent ARDURRA is billing St. Johns County $191/hour for CAMERON's time; CAMERON gets $75/hour.
4. Respondent SJC BoCC failed to honor citizen requests to adopt rules on post-employment ethics restrictions or lobbying that would have required more disclosure re: CAMERON and ARDURRA.
5. Respondents SJC BoCC and Commissioner JAY MORRIS may have deprived citizens of their legal rights to honest services, public meeting free speech, freedom of the press and open records. They've taken a combative, hostile approach about the ARDURRA contract, claiming the County was treated unfairly and inaccurately by the St. Augustine Record newspaper, while affecting hurt feelings. and even claiming favorable audit results from the FEMA Inspector General.
6. Respondent SJC County Administrator MICHAEL DAVID WANCHICK may possibly have overstated damage values, constituting possible false claims, as is suggested by St. Johns County Administrator MICHAEL WANCHICK's initial claim there were billions of dollars in damages, http://staugustine.com/news-local-news/2016-10-08/preliminary-estimates-damage-county-top-2-billion Has the IG investigated his subsequent hurried efforts to revise possibly incomplete or inaccurate data to win federal disaster status.
7. Is there possible waste, fraud, abuse, misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance or retaliation by any of Respondents?
8. Pursuant to the IG Act, please initiate a civil, criminal and administrative investigation.
Thank you.















John Roth

Inspector General John Roth
John Roth assumed the post of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on March 10, 2014.
Mr. Roth, who previously served as Director of the Office of Criminal Investigations at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), was nominated to lead the DHS Office of Inspector General by President Barack Obama and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on March 6, 2014.
Prior to his move to the FDA in June 2012, Mr. Roth had a long and distinguished career with the Department of Justice (DOJ), beginning in 1987 as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.  From 1994 to 1999, he was Chief of the Narcotics Section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.
From 1999 to 2004, Mr. Roth served as Section Chief at DOJ’s Criminal Division for the Narcotic and Dangerous Drugs Section and the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section.  During that time, he served a detail as Senior Counsel and Team Leader for the congressionally chartered 9/11 Commission and helped to compile a monograph on terrorist financing for the Commission’s final report.
In 2004, Mr. Roth became an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, working on fraud and public corruption cases.  In 2007, he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division and became chief of staff to the Deputy Attorney General in 2008.
Mr. Roth culminated his DOJ career in Paris, France, as the department’s lead representative on the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organization fighting against money laundering and terrorist financing.
Mr. Roth earned a B.A. and a law degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.

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