Thanks to County Commissioners for blowing the whistle. Good investigative reporting by Jake Martin. Good questions by Commissioners, especially Chair James K. Johns, an engineer, one of the best cross-examiners in local governments. Keep up the good work!
Watch tape here. (Item 7).
The only other government in Florida that hired ARDURRA GROUP, LLC is corrupt Opa-Locka, a crime scene -- one where several City officials have gone to prison, including the City Manager and Public Works Director (a City Commissioner was sentenced to no prison time after he flipped and agreed to testify against other criminal officials and businessmen)
What does that tell you? St. Johns County hired ARDURRA GROUP -- why? On whose recommendation? With what references? With what background investigation? I've filed records requests for it this morning.
We need more investigative reporting here in St. Augustine and St. Johns County. Now is the time, with GateHouse having taken over the Record on October 2, 2017 from coverup-prone managers of MORRIS COMMUNICATIONS, which ran the Record into the ground for 35 years.
GateHouse funds investigative reporting.
GateHouse wins Pulitzer Prizes.
Go, GateHouse, Go!
Yes we can!
St. Johns County Administrator MICHAEL DAVID WANCHICK
with Sheriff DAVID BERNARD SHOAR (who legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994)
By JAKE MARTIN jake.martin@staugustine.com
St. Johns County Commission asks who has link with state for Matthew recovery, consultant says ‘We would hope you did’
St. Johns County is 10 months into a contract with Ardurra Group, a Louisiana-based consultant brought in after Hurricane Matthew to navigate the county through the disaster recovery process. Only on Tuesday did someone raise the question, “Who’s driving the train?”
The question came from Commission Chair Jimmy Johns well into a board discussion regarding ongoing efforts related to Matthew as well as Hurricane Irma.
At their previous meeting, commissioners requested an update on where things stand with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s public assistance program, through which the county is seeking reimbursements for projects and expenses related to Matthew.
Counties and cities impacted by last year’s storm are experiencing difficulty securing FEMA reimbursements through the state. St. Johns County has yet to receive so much as a dollar for Matthew. In the meantime, it has spent $23.1 million, mostly on debris removal and activation of emergency personnel, as well as $1.5 million for Ardurra’s services.
SEE ALSO
More promises, no check as St. Johns County waits for Hurricane Matthew money--------------
Joe Giammanco, disaster recovery manager for the county, told commissioners he’s driving the train, working with department heads and administration, as well as the consultant.
He said Ardurra helps the county identify the damages, take the necessary photos, and build the cases and the stories of what Matthew did, all to FEMA’s parameters, which are extensive. He said all submissions have been made on time and that Ardurra is in complete compliance with its contract.
“Everything we’ve needed to get done, we’ve gotten done,” Giammanco said, adding there have been some “hiccups” along the way.
He also said Ardurra has met the county’s expectations and that “any issues” have been amended at the consultant’s cost.
Throughout the discussion, certain commissioners, mainly Johns, as well as Commissioners Jeb Smith and Paul Waldron, expressed frustration with not knowing what their roles are supposed to be in the process.
Smith said he didn’t feel like he was kept as informed as he should be. Waldron requested weekly or bi-weekly updates on where the county stands in the process, as well as information on whom commissioners should be reaching out to and what questions they should be asking.
Johns led much of the questioning of the consultant, whose presence at Tuesday’s meeting was the first time someone with Ardurra has publicly addressed the board concerning the reimbursement process.
Ardurra representative Craig P. Taffaro said the consultancy has been in the business of disaster recovery for about 15 years, under various names and partnerships, with the bulk of operations kicking in around 2005 with a slew of hurricanes that impacted Louisiana and other Gulf states.
He said Ardurra is not providing services for anyone else in Florida for Matthew, but that it is providing services for the City of Opa-Locka, in Miami-Dade County, for Irma. He said he had not provided any services in Florida prior to Ardurra securing the contract with St. Johns County.
Commissioners seemed to have little to no familiarity with Taffaro. At one point, Smith even requested the consultant to repeat his last name as it slipped his mind.
Johns told Taffaro he was under the impression the county hired a consultant to expedite or better explain the process, but said the county has yet to receive any reimbursements and he was lacking clarity overall. He asked what the county is doing wrong.
Taffaro said the focus should instead be on what “opportunities” the commissioners, as elected officials, have in order to connect with state and federal officials, and ask them “very pointed questions.” He suggested commissioners open a continuous line of communication to find out how many people are assigned to reviewing St. Johns County’s projects and on what timeline they’re reviewing those projects.
“When we ask a general question and get a general answer, it doesn’t really provide us any confidence in terms of what the outcome will be,” Taffaro told commissioners.
However, Johns said his questions to the state about when the county can expect to receive obligation, or how long it’s expected to take the state to complete its review, are already objective and measurable.
Johns eventually turned his attention to Ardurra’s proposal to the county, which he said had indicated there was a FEMA Region IV director on their team. Taffaro said the director was really an “access support person” or a “reach,” rather than a team member.
Johns said the proposal the board had approved, and upon which a contract was built, stated a Region IV director was part of the team, to which Taffaro said he did not put the proposal together. After Johns asked who did and Taffaro listed three names, none of which were his, Johns, after a pause, said, “That’s troublesome.”
Johns then asked who on Ardurra’s team has the relationship with the state to guide the county through the reimbursement process, which elicited the response from Taffaro, “We would hope you did.”
“I thought that’s why we hired you,” Johns replied, to which Taffaro said he couldn’t help him in that department and followed that up by saying he has the “experience and expertise as to how to cultivate those relationships.”
Taffaro’s response was met by several seconds of silence, which Taffaro broke by saying people may be added to or leave a project for various reasons. He said Ardurra ramps up or ramps down in terms of need.
Johns asked how many people Taffaro currently has working in St. Johns County, to which Taffaro said seven.
County Administrator Michael Wanchick had already conceded the update from staff as well as the consultant was “long overdue” and acknowledged the board’s frustration over the wait time for obligation of funds.
He said the “philosophy” for the disaster recovery process — that of maximizing reimbursement while minimizing de-obligation of funds down the road, perhaps at the expense of speed — started with his office, before Giammanco and before Ardurra.
County Attorney Patrick McCormack tried to clarify Ardurra’s role in the process, saying the consultant has “the magic words,” so to speak, and that Ardurra’s job is to help package projects rather than be a squeaky wheel.
The Record on Thursday afternoon requested Ardurra’s proposal to the county, the county’s master contract with Ardurra as well as any and all task orders issued for Ardurra to provide consulting services to the county. As of close of business Friday, no responding documents were provided.
In 2011, Taffaro, then president of St. Bernard Parish, was the primary subject of a series of investigative articles by ProPublica on “spillionaires.” The general premise was some people cleaned up in more ways than one after the 2010 BP oil spill that resulted from the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
Taffaro, a psychotherapist turned politician who eventually came to be described as a southeast Louisiana powerbroker, was accused of handing out clean-up jobs based on favoritism rather than qualifications.
As president of St. Bernard Parish, about five miles east of New Orleans, Taffaro had declared a state of emergency following the spill, allowing him to award contracts without competitive bidding. According to ProPublica, longtime associates of Taffaro’s got lucrative spill-related work and then helped raise money for his re-election.
In the months following ProPublica’s initial article in April 2011, Taffaro reportedly told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform the story was a “hatchet job” with “no factual data.” He had also maintained he worked up to 20 hours a day during the clean-up and didn’t make a single dollar more than his salary, and that the spill jobs were handed out fairly.
Taffaro was elected as the parish’s president in 2008, after serving two stints as a councilman there, from 1996 to 2000 and 2004 to 2008. He left the parish in December 2011 to become Louisiana’s director of hazard mitigation and recovery under then-Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration. This was after Taffaro lost a contentious run-off election the previous month to his former chief administrative officer, whom he had fired in September 2008, and who ran on what local media referred to as largely an anti-Taffaro campaign.
The BP spill wasn’t the parish’s first brush with disaster or a large influx of outside funds under Taffaro’s watch. The parish bore the brunt of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when Taffaro was a councilman, enlisting the services of Ardurra Group to manage FEMA funds, act as liaison, ensure program compliance and oversee closeout.
It was unclear as of Saturday when Taffaro joined Ardurra. The group’s website lists just three staff members and he’s not one of them.
The City of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, impacted by a tornado in January, was in receipt of a proposal on April 5 from Broaddus &Associates, a firm based in Austin, Texas, to provide disaster consulting services. The proposal, readily available from the city’s website, listed Ardurra as a sub-consultant, and provided project overviews of the group’s work in St. Bernard Parish and St. Johns County, among other locations.
According to the proposal, Ardurra, in St. Bernard Parish, completed a “100 percent rebuild of a community, including its infrastructure (sewer, water, drainage), roads, parks, emergency facilities, all government buildings and community leisure/tourism facilities” with a total project cost of $1.5 billion.
The proposal says Ardurra increased FEMA-obligated funding by 500 percent, with no negative funding or de-obligation “during that period of time.” The work dates provided are 2005 to 2017 (ongoing).
The overview for St. Johns County indicates a total project cost of $300 million, with services provided by Ardurra including program management, grant application and management, professional engineering support, IT and data management, procurement and contract support, and debris removal oversight.
According to the proposal, Ardurra, as of April, had recommended the following to St. Johns County (verbatim):
• Updating the Debris Management Plan to reduce the County’s match for debris removal by 2 percent
• Recycling sand collected as debris to obtain additional financial credit
• Obtaining approval to collect contiguous debris on private property (Debris that extends from public property onto private property can be approved for collection by FEMA), benefiting local residents
• Obtaining Right of Entries to address debris on private property, once again benefiting local residents.
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