Commissioners raise concerns about early work on Sheriff's Office training center
By Jared Keever
Posted Mar 27, 2019 at 12:01 AM
St. Augustine Record
Just a little more than a month after they voted to fund the construction of a training center for the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, county commissioners have raised questions about work done on the property ahead of that vote.
The issue came up at the end of the commissioner’s March 19 meeting when Commissioner Jimmy Johns said he had been contacted by Jacksonville-based engineering firm RAM with concerns that they had been told they were “precluded from participating in the design build process” of the $15 million project because they had already provided some form of “design services” in the early phases of the work.
“I simply passed that on to staff and it’s become a lot more complicated,” he said.
What Johns said he got back from county staff was a collection of documents consisting of a timeline “and documentation to back up that timeline that’s thicker than our agenda book.”
“My primary concern is that, in summary, it appears that the board did not approve funding for the Sheriff’s facility in our budget, the Sheriff used funds from some other sources to have design work performed, I was never made privy to that design work related to a roadway to the future Sheriff’s facilities in conversations with staff or the Sheriff’s Office when discussing the $15 million item,” he said. “And that’s why I am asking questions.”
That set the stage for a roughly 15-minute conversation that ended with commissioners voting unanimously to have County administration send a letter to the St. Johns County Clerk of Court & Comptroller’s Office asking the Inspector General there to look into the matter.
During the course of that conversation Commissioner Jeb Smith referenced an estimated $700,000 that Sheriff David Shoar said in an October presentation that his agency had spent on site preparation to get the roughly 50-acre plot of land, which is owned by the county, ready for the project.
Of that, according to documents that he had been provided by Johns, $59,000 had been paid by the Sheriff’s Office to RAM, Smith said.
“Where did the funding come from?” he said.
Reached by phone early Tuesday afternoon, Smith said his concern was that, although the commissioners originally gave the green light for the project back in 2015, it was his understanding that getting started on the work was contingent on funding — the final vote for which didn’t come until their meeting on Feb. 5 of this year.
“But the Sheriff went ahead and started in on the project and he funded it,” said Smith, who voted against the funding measure.
In addition, he said that he had not seen any accounting for proceeds from timber sales on 53 acres that had been cleared.
Shoar, in a phone interview later Tuesday evening, said his agency did everything they were supposed to and took issue with the notion that the 2015 vote didn’t give him the go-ahead to get to work on prepping the land.
He called much of what Johns said at the meeting “unintelligible nonsense” and pointed out that all of the money spent out of his own agency, the land clearing, and a water management permit that had been secured was all disclosed at his October presentation and it should come as no surprise to Johns, an engineer, that the permit could not have been secured without the work of an engineer.
Asked about that on Tuesday, Johns said that “we can all sit down and have this conversation but I don’t want to he-said, she-said over the phone.”
And although Shoar said he knew that both Johns and Smith said they weren’t alleging that anything improper had taken place, he also took issue with the way the topic was brought up at the end of a meeting with no one from his agency present to defend it.
“I take great offense to the way it was done,” he said. “In my opinion they tried to cast aspersions on the project.”
Shoar said it was his opinion that Johns and Smith had both obstructed the project.
Johns, who did vote to approve the funding in February, “has moved the goal post” since the beginning, Shoar said.
The entire item will likely come back up at the commission’s April 2 meeting.
County Attorney Patrick McCormack said early Tuesday that he had been researching what the clerk has jurisdiction to review when another constitutional office, like the Sheriff’s Offic,e is involved and that the letter had not been drafted.
He also said that after a preliminary review of RAM’s involvement in the early stages of the project — following Johns’ raising of concerns — it is not entirely clear that they will be ineligible to participate in future work.
In a followup phone conversation, McCormack said that, though the letter still had not been drafted, he had spoken directly with the Clerk’s Office and said it is “anticipated” they will “review the matter” in so far as “compliance or non-compliance with the county’s purchasing and land development regulations” are concerned.
“That will be reviewed and reported on,” he said.
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