‘Emergency’ repair project criticized by city commissioners

BY PRU SOWER

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

When Key West City Commissioners began debating whether to pay close to a quarter of a million dollars to move a county health clinic from the Frederick Douglass Gym in Bahama Village to a new, permanent home two blocks away, Commissioner Clayton Lopez had to recuse himself. As a Monroe County Health Department preventative training counselor, he had a potential conflict of interest in voting to help the agency that is his employer.

But once off the commission dais, Lopez said there was no conflict in advocating for the proposal, which would spend $247,500 in what city officials would initially call an emergency procurement to move the Roosevelt Sands Community Health Resource Center, a Monroe County health clinic, out of the Douglass Gym building and into the Douglass Gym Band Room about two blocks away while the gym building undergoes repair. Lopez invited three local newspapers, including Konk Life, to tour the dilapidated gym building and band room, pointing out the rotting concrete, rusted metal rebar and dangling wires.

Initially, the health clinic was going to be able to stay where it is – in a wing of the building at 111 Olivia Street that does not need repairs – during the gym renovation, where it pays no rent to the city but provides out-patient health services to the residents of Bahama Village. But when inspections of the gym building turned up more serious structural problems than originally expected, the clinic was in trouble.

“Six to eight months ago we found out that was not going to be possible,” Lopez said about leaving the clinic where it is during the repair work. “Now the scramble begins. We’ve got to come up with a place to put them until [construction] is done,” Lopez said.

Kreed Howell, the city’s senior construction manager, said he looked into renting temporary trailers for the health clinic to use for the estimated year it will take to repair the gym. But the cost was a surprising $186,000. So city officials began to look at other options and decided that by spending an extra approximately $60,000 above the temporary trailer fee, they could create a permanent home for the clinic in the nearby band room building, which hasn’t been used since about 2008 and is currently filled with trash and mold.

“If we were going to have to move them [clinic staffers] anyway, why not? The health department wouldn’t be in the predicament that it is if we didn’t need to fix our building,” Lopez said.

City commissioners will take up the issue again at their next meeting. The $247,500 emergency spending resolution was postponed on Jan. 5 when Commissioner Sam Kaufman questioned whether it was actually an emergency procurement, defined as city commission ratification of an emergency spending decision already made by the city manager that allows for the usual competitive bidding process to be suspended. Kaufman took Assistant City Manager Greg Veliz to task, saying there were too many unanswered questions about the emergency proposal.

“It’s clear there is an error in terms of how this item is stated,” Kaufman said. “I’m a little confused as to why the regular procurement process did not take place in identifying a contractor to do this work.”

Veliz said the reason his team “circumvented” the normal purchasing guidelines was that the project was moving very rapidly and contractor prices change quickly. City officials were trying to keep the gym repair project moving forward while locking in a price on the band room renovations, he said, and they got three informal cost estimates from local contractors. Bella Construction of Key West had the lowest estimate at $247,500. Pedro Falcon Contractors had the next lowest price at $279,739. The third bid was from Burke Construction Group, the contractor currently renovating the new City Hall on White Street, at $656,857.

But Veliz admitted that the resolution should not have been presented to commissioners as an emergency procurement, allowing Bella to be hired without seeking formal competitive bids.

“We way mishandled it in declaring it was an emergency. It was not an emergency purchase and we just botched that one,” he said.

“I think it’s a lot of money without going to competitive bidding on it,” said Commissioner Billy Wardlow in response to Veliz. “You get more people bidding on it, you might have got a better price.”

City Manager Jim Scholl is expected to reword the proposal and bring it back to commissioners at their Jan. 20 meeting when they will decide whether or not to suspend the bidding guidelines.

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