Miami-Dade mayor drops MCM fight and will negotiate airport deal with FIU bridge contractor
The firm is on track for a five-year, $70 million contract to manage construction work on bathroom renovations and other small jobs at the airport.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava dropped out of the roughest contracting fight of her young administration on Tuesday, announcing she would negotiate a new airport contract with MCM despite a county investigation critical of the firm.
Levine Cava’s brief Tuesday memo announcing that a new MCM contract at Miami International Airport “will be forthcoming” marks the second big win for MCM at County Hall after its role as the contractor behind the Florida International University bridge that collapsed in 2018.
The politically active South Miami firm won a no-bid, short-term extension at MIA in
2019 under then-Mayor Carlos Gimenez. Now, it’s on track for a new fiveyear, $70 million contract under Levine Cava awarding and managing construction work on bathroom renovations and other small jobs at the
airport.
Levine Cava has resisted negotiating the new MCM contract, which commissioners endorsed in a May 4 vote. That vote came before the MiamiDade Office of the Inspector General released a May 12 report critical of the company’s management of the MIA contract.
Levine Cava, elected in November after six years on the commission, cited the OIG report in a June 9 memo to commissioners stating she planned to negotiate a contract with a lower-ranked bidder, MasTec subsidiary Lemartec. The OIG report accused MCM of “egregious” mismanagement for allowing its top MIA manager to run a side construction business with subcontractors picked for MCM’s county jobs at the airport.
MCM called the report “politically motivated” for its timing since it revolved around a business arrangement that ended in 2017 yet was made public as MCM was close to winning a new contract. The company produced handwritten notes from 2019 by OIG’s general counsel, Patra Liu, citing the “political stakes” in the MCM case while Liu argued against closing the investigation that year, as investigators had recommended.
“I think the OIG had a political ax to grind against MCM for some reason,” MCM lobbyist Eric Zichella said Monday. “But it’s totally improper for them to carry out political retribution through their investigations.”
The Inspector General’s Office defended the report as revealing MCM let a manager do business with companies that essentially won county contracts through MCM in its outsourcing arrangement with MIA.
“Once the General Counsel was presented with the close out request, she recognized this as more than a violation of outside employment,” the office said Monday of Liu. “The fact that Mr. Calderin was awarding [county airport] bids to subcontractors he had a financial relationship with ... created a conflict of interest that merited further investigation and a public report.”
Alberto Calderin is MCM’s top MIA manager.
At last week’s meeting of the commission’s Airport and Economic Development committee, the Office of the Inspector
General’s report divided the chamber.
Keon Hardemon, the committee’s chairperson, said he didn’t think commissioners should let the Inspector General’s Office critique MCM’s management track record when the investigation was about whether Calderin had earned money illegally from subcontractors.
“How much weight should you really give an OIG report that gives an opinion on the work of an employee in a contract at the airport? They were brought on really to find out if this guy was getting kickbacks, and they concluded he was not.”
“I don’t know how we as a committee overcome the findings of the OIG
report,” Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins said. “How do we as a body sit here and argue with a four- or five-year investigation ... that determined egregious lack of managerial oversight?”
From the start, the MIA construction contract posed a test of MCM’s budding comeback after the March 15, 2018, collapse of a pedestrian bridge that Florida International University hired the firm to build over Eighth Street.
Federal investigators traced the bridge’s collapse back to a structural flaw created by FIGG, the firm that MCM hired to design the bridge. The report by the National Transportation Safety
Board also faulted MCM, FIU and others involved in the project for not reacting appropriately when workers found growing cracks on the bridge yet allowed traffic to flow on Eighth Street for days before the collapse.
Long one of the most politically active contractors in county government, MCM halted donations after the collapse while navigating a bankruptcy that allowed it to retain existing contracts. That included the MIA agreement, which went out to bid for a new five-year extension in 2020.
The bridge collapse has not come up in the commission debate over whether MCM should get the contract.
County records show MCM was already recommended for two smaller Miami-Dade jobs this year under Levine Cava, including a bridge replacement contracted at a canal in Southwest Miami-Dade.
For a pipe-replacememant contract, the Water and Sewer Department endorsed the company in a May 17 memo “after a review of MCM’s safety record” that included citing the National Transportation Safety Board’s conclusion that FIGG’s design flaw brought down the bridge.
In her memo Tuesday, Levine Cava said she got the message from the airport committee that enough commissioners still supported MCM after the OIG report and that the original 9-4 vote from May to negotiate with the company would likely stand.
“It is clear from the discussion at the committee that there is still a desire to direct the Administration to negotiate with MCM,” she said. “A negotiated contract with MCM will be forthcoming.”
Some Airport committee members who were skeptical of MCM last week expressed amazement at Levine Cava’s takeaway from the meeting, which ended with no action taken on the MIA contract. “We have to respect the process,” said Commissioner René Garcia, who backs Lemartec for the contract. “This is unacceptable.”
Levine Cava said with the current MCM contract expiring in August, she didn’t want to add more time before a contract came back to the commission for a final vote. “We need to move forward,” she said.