Inspector General faults Miami-Dade effort to buy CNG buses
In the fall of 2017, purchasing staff at Miami-Dade’s transit agency was finishing up a $106 million contract to purchase 181 buses running on compressed natural gas for a county fleet with vehicles old enough that breakdowns were causing chronic service disruptions.
The purchase would be quick, since Miami-Dade planned to piggyback on a bus contract already negotiated by Central Florida’s transit authority to buy the modern, low-emission buses from Gillig, a California-based vehicle maker.
That effort stalled once it landed on the desk of transit director Alice Bravo. She overruled the staff and insisted it start fresh by trying to negotiate a new deal to buy buses through New Flyer, a Canadian bus maker already producing 300 natural-gas buses from a $321 million Miami-Dade contract approved in early 2017 to launch its compressed-gas fleet. That bus order was part of a larger agreement with fuel company Trillium to not only order the county’s first natural-gas buses, but to build two fueling stations to service them as well.
Bravo’s alleged attempt to steer a multimillion-dollar bus purchase away from Gillig and toward New Flyer is one subject in an extensive report by the Miami-Dade inspector general’s office that attempts to unravel one of the county’s most convoluted and contested procurement fights in the last several years.
Lobbyists on both sides sought to tug Miami-Dade’s bus business their way, and the report illustrates the tension and suspicions that helped slow a bus-system upgrade that’s been a county goal for most of the decade.
“Without a clear plan articulated” for buying new compressed-gas buses, the administration’s “multimillion-dollar capital procurement program was slipping from the department’s control to the political arena,” the report said. It was referring to the time in December 2018 when county commissioners intervened and forced the Gillig purchase of “CNG” buses that Bravo had vetoed 14 months earlier.
The report describes the proposed Gillig purchase as the quickest way for Miami
Dade to obtain new naturalgas buses that could function in much the same way the ones from New Flyer would, with both models capable of using Trillium’s fuel depots. Bravo said she saw clear advantages in ordering through Trillium, and that the purchasing process would let Gillig compete for the business, too.
The delay caused by rejecting the Gillig contract came during a stretch when the county’s underfunded bus system was losing riders amid mechanical breakdowns tied to an aging fleet. Miami-Dade’s plan was to replace its 750-bus fleet with more energy-efficient vehicles that ran quieter and with less pollution than the standard diesel engines.
At the time Bravo rejected the Gillig purchase, MiamiDade’s bus fleet had hit a low point in terms of bus reliability. The average age of a county bus hit 11 years and six months, just shy of the 12-year “useful” lifespan established by the Federal Transit Administration.
For the budget year that ended Sept. 30, 2017, the average Miami-Dade bus went 2,955 miles between mechanical breakdowns. That was slightly worse than the 3,109 miles recorded the year before, and about 42 percent worse than the fleet’s current record after the arrival of hundreds of new buses from New Flyer.
“It’s absolutely crucial to have new buses,” said Azhar Chougle, director of Transit Alliance Miami, an advocacy group that last year documented reliability problems with Miami-Dade’s bus system. The group’s “Where’s My Bus?” study found nearly a third of county buses ran late on weekdays, with staffing issues and out-of-service vehicles due to mechanical problems both cited as reasons. “We still operate buses from 1999.”
A September breakdown of Miami-Dade’s bus fleet shows 10 diesel vehicles built in 1999 remain the oldest buses running routes across Miami-Dade. The newest: 111 natural-gas buses from New Flyer built in 2019, followed by 169 of the same type of New Flyer buses built in 2018.
The Sept. 4 memo doesn’t include the new Gillig buses that the inspector general’s report said began arriving on Sept. 24, days after the last of the 300 New Flyer buses were delivered. Karla Damian, a spokeswoman for Miami-Dade’s transit agency, said one Gillig bus joined the fleet this month while four others are still being tested.
A large chunk of the inspector general’s report knocks down safety concerns by the county’s transit union that the New Flyer buses were dangerous because of leaking gas. Investigators noted that some compressed gas does escape in servicing the vehicles, but called concerns about malfunctioning New Flyer buses “unfounded.” In a statement, New Flyer said it was glad the inspector general’s review of the county’s natural-gas fleet “concluded that the buses are safe.”
Investigators were less definitive in explaining the internal resistance to buying Gillig buses over New Flyer. The account said that after transit staff spent months pursuing a $106 million Gillig contract to be approved by Mayor Carlos Gimenez and county commissioners, Bravo was stunned to learn in October 2017 that such a big-ticket purchase was in the works.
“Director Bravo recounted being presented with a file containing a complete package for the purchase of the 181 buses,” investigators wrote in the Nov. 13 report. “She told [investigators] that she was taken aback by this, as she was completely unaware that staff had been pursuing a large purchase of CNG buses” through Central Florida.
In her interviews for the report, Bravo described her own procurement concerns with the county. Bravo said she had mistakenly believed the original deal with Trillium allowed Miami-Dade to expand the original bus order. When she realized her mistake, she told investigators “she became suspicious” and felt “she was being steered towards buying off” the Central Florida contract.
Bravo, an engineer and former assistant manager at the city of Miami who became the county’s transit director in 2015, said this week that she was troubled that the Trillium deal included a cap on buses that could be purchased through that agreement. She said the bulk of the framework of the deal was negotiated before she took over — the bidding process began in 2014 — and she couldn’t believe Miami-Dade would opt to limit the county’s purchasing options.
“I couldn’t get a straight answer,” she said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “It seemed very odd to me.”
Bravo also pointed to protections in the Trillium contract that require the company to cover costs related to delivery issues for buses ordered through its deal with Miami-Dade — safeguards Bravo noted wouldn’t be available through the Central Florida contract.
After county lawyers shut down Bravo’s effort to redo the Trillium agreement, she declined to go for the quick purchase option of the Central Florida contract with Gillig. Instead, in the fall of 2018 the agency began drafting bid documents to let Gillig, New Flyer and other makers of the CNG buses compete under updated specifications that
Miami-Dade could draft after having the original New Flyer buses in its fleet for most of the year.
Though the report describes Bravo as pursuing New Flyer buses through the Trillium contract, Bravo said this week she expected the fuel-depot developer to hold its own procurement contest that would be open to all bus makers. The company was required to perform a similar contest ahead of submitting the 2017 fueldepot proposal that included New Flyer as the planned bus provider.
While Bravo pushed for a new bus contest in late
2018, Miami-Dade commissioners intervened to help Gillig.
The day Audrey Edmonson was elected as the new chairwoman of the County Commission, on Dec. 4, 2018, she won passage of a resolution instructing the administration to use the Central Florida contract to buy what turned out to be 120 Gillig buses.
At the time, lobbyists Al Maloof and Roosevelt Bradley were pushing the Gillig purchase, while rival lobbyists Alex Heckler and Michael Llorente fought for New Flyer to get more county business.
A small constructionmanagement firm owned by Ralph Garcia-Toledo, finance chairman for Gimenez’s 2016 reelection campaign, was part of the 2017 Trillium contract, but said the developer makes no money from vehicle purchases since it only serves as a middle man for MiamiDade and bus makers. “Trillium has nothing to do with buses,” he said. “And I have even less.”
Competition for county bus orders intensified after Edmonson’s legislation jump-started purchasing efforts. Investigators described the process as a “procurement free-for-all” as the commission over several months considered a string of legislative proposals for a third wave of bus purchases, for 140 vehicles, through an existing contract with Virginia’s Transportation Department that would be open to Gillig and New Flyer. None of the proposals passed.
In July, the administration invited bus makers to submit their best offers for 140 buses, with a recommendation on the award expected to make its way to the commission in the coming weeks or months.
But it may not be the last twist in the road to new buses for Miami-Dade. The Gimenez administration is proposing a $47 million increase to the Trillium deal to build a third fuel depot, a move the inspector general said all but commits Miami-Dade to a bus fleet run on compressed natural gas.
Earlier this year, MiamiDade agreed to spend $72 million to buy its first electric buses, with 33 on the way from Proterra out of California. In its report, the inspector general asked about the potential for more electric-charging options, and urged MiamiDade to pause expanding its compressed-gas fleet to come up with a long-term strategy for the kind of bus mix it wants in the future.
“Miami-Dade County is at a critical juncture where the decisions are being made that will set the course of public transit for a generation,” the authors wrote.
In a Nov. 5 memo to inspector general Mary Cagle, Bravo rejected the recommendation. She said the existing natural-gas fleet needs more fueling options, and therefore “we will be forwarding the option to modify the Trillium contract to the Board of County Commissioners for consideration this month.”