At MIA, county probe found a contracting contest ‘rank with greed, bias, cronyism’

When Miami International Airport wanted to bid out its baggage-handling contract five years ago, influential insiders worked to keep the competition from having a fair shot at the business.

That’s the conclusion of a scathing new report from the county’s Inspector General office, which examined how a firm that won top scores from a selection committee in 2013 wound up losing to a firm that already held the $163 million contract to run the system that moves luggage from airplanes to baggage carousels on the airport’s ground floor.

The report released this week by Inspector General Mary Cagle calls the events between 2012 and 2015 a “procurement embarrassment” and part of a “process rank with greed, bias, cronyism and undue influence.”

Lester Sola, a veteran county administrator who took over as airport director last year, issued a statement Wednesday saying a consultant involved in the baggage-handling matter had been dismissed and that the contract itself won’t be extended.

“We have taken aggressive action in direct response to these findings,” Sola said.

The report delves into the complex layers of management firms and contractors that run the bulk of the operations at the $1 billion-a-year, county-owned airport. It alleges executives at some firms worked with a county staffer to make sure the holder of the baggage contract, John Bean Technologies, won out over competitor Oxford Airport Technical Services.

The staffer, Debra Shore, served as a nonvoting member of the selection committee weighing the two proposals. It initially gave Oxford higher scores than John Bean, and the report alleges Shore spent about a year working with John Bean and another MIA contractor to raise doubts about Oxford within upper management at the airport.

County rules bar communication during a selection process, in order to prevent some companies from having inside tracks to decision makers. The report points to an October 2013 cruise sponsored in part by John Bean that Shore attended. Labeled as an “Out-of-Country Workshop,” the cruise from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico, was attended by Shore and another MIA employee, along with executives from airport contractors and vendors, according to a roster obtained by investigators. A footnote in the report said Shore paid her own way for the four-day cruise, and MIA said the other employee did, too.

Miami-Dade tossed the original selection process in 2014 and asked companies to bid again on the baggage-handling contract. In the second round, Shore was made a voting member of the selection committee. The report claims Shore was in close contact with an MIA consultant, AvAir, that also wanted John Bean to keep the baggage contract.

In 2015, according to the report, an AvAir executive emailed Shore a spreadsheet with recommendations on how to score the competitors in John Bean’s favor. Weeks earlier, Shore had emailed her résumé to AvAir, which hired her after the selection committee recommended John Bean for the contract. John Bean won the contract later that year after a vote by the County Commission.

AvAir was dismissed by MIA after a draft version of the IG’s report was released earlier this year. The company’s lawyer, Brian Tannebaum, called the report unfair to both AvAir and Shore, who still works at AvAir. “It seems like a very angrily written report,” he said.

He said the communication that sparked such outrage from county investigators simply reflected Shore’s administrative duties connected to John Bean’s existing contract. He questioned why the report focused so heavily on outside firms and not MIA’s upper management itself, since the airport had asked AvAir to weigh in on the baggage-handling contract and the firm’s advice could have been ignored.

“Many of the conclusions in this report lack a factual basis, and are a result of misinterpretations,” he wrote in an April 22 letter to Cagle.

This story was originally published May 8, 2019 at 6:09 PM.