After five years and an ‘ugly’ process, Miami-Dade is still trying to buy helicopters

Miami-Dade has been trying to buy new rescue helicopters for five years, and the purchasing process may be the messiest ever for a county famous for extended procurement fights.

It sparked a brief criminal investigation, though no charges were filed. Ethics investigators were far more productive, issuing scathing reports accusing bidder Agusta and administrators in the county’s fire department of flouting rules governing how local governments are supposed to select vendors.

The Aug. 23 report detailed an “alarming” amount of texts and phone calls between an Agusta sales executive and administrators at the county’s fire department at a time when purchasing rules barred private communication. The report also said it “strains credibility” to believe that the communications had nothing to do with Agusta’s helicopter bid.

“This is the most messed-up, ugly procurement I have ever seen in my history of being in public office,” Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz — a county commissioner since 2002 and mayor of Sweetwater before that — said during a Sept. 12 hearing on the proposed award to Agusta of the $95 million helicopter contract.

“Commissioner,” responded Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who recommended the Agusta award, “I can’t disagree with you.”

On Thursday, Gimenez hopes to rescue the flawed contracting effort from the wreckage and win commission approval of the proposal to buy four new Agusta helicopters and sell the four existing Bell helicopters for about $12 million. That would result in a net cost of about $83 million, which includes replacement parts and a service plan that comes with the helicopter purchases.

Bell is offering roughly the same price, according to an Gimenez memo released this week. Bell, a Texas-based company, was recommended three times by the selection panels Miami-Dade convened to screen bids between 2015 and 2017 — despite the extra communication from Agusta.

“We played by the rules,” Tim Gomez, a Bell lobbyist, told commissioners at the hearing. “Do not reward bad actors. Bell won this process. ... Then these guys blew it up. They violated, and we got punished.”

Gimenez does not dispute the misconduct in the helicopter procurement process, which bars private conversations between bidders, county administrators and members of selection committees screening contracts. He’s arguing that despite the flaws in screening bids, Agusta still makes the best helicopter for Miami-Dade. In a side-by-side comparison of the two models, the county’s purchasing arm showed Agusta helicopters flying 40 knots faster, capable of carrying an extra 3,000 pounds, and able to operate with just one engine while Bell’s cannot.

The Agusta helicopter “gets patients to a trauma center faster, safer and more efficiently,” Gimenez said in the memo.

One of the selling points for purchasing new Bell helicopters is county pilots are already trained and familiar with the company’s aircraft. A 2017 report by Lee Benson, a helicopter consultant hired by Miami-Dade to review the air-rescue program, warned the unit wouldn’t be able to handle the disruptive transition to a new model.

“The idea of acquiring a new make and model aircraft should be halted, period,” wrote Benson. “In my best professional opinion this would be a disaster.”

In a Sept. 26 letter to county commissioners, Bell vice president Susan Griffin claimed Gimenez’s recent memo “cherry-picked” specifications favorable to Agusta from the hundreds requested by the county, and then added others Miami-Dade hadn’t even said it would consider during the procurement process. “Bell remains deeply concerned about the integrity ... of the procurement process,” she wrote.

The attempted purchase of four new rescue helicopters was once a matter of fiscal urgency for Miami-Dade, back in the budget crisis of 2014. At the time, Gimenez had proposed closing the county’s boot camp program for young offenders to balance the budget. He then announced a string of measures to avoid closing boot camp and proposed other cuts, including $14 million from selling the existing Bell helicopters and then spending the windfall by leasing new helicopters instead of buying them.

Boot camp remained open, but the helicopters were never sold. In the years that followed, Miami-Dade’s helicopter shopping became another example of the county’s challenges when it comes to purchasing decisions.

After pitched lobbying battles over which firms should get lucrative contracts overseeing sewer-system repairs and staffing Metrorail stations with security guards, Gimenez in 2014 announced a task force aimed at “making it easier to do business with Miami-Dade.”

The task force has never met, with the Gimenez administration blaming county commissioners for not appointing enough members for the task force to start its work. “I stopped calling,” said Charles Dusseau, a former county commissioner appointed to the panel by Gimenez. “It tells me that people really don’t want to have any review of the procurement process. They like it the way it is.”

Miami-Dade soon dropped the idea of leasing helicopters in favor of just purchasing new replacements.

The helicopter procurement then drew the attention of Miami-Dade prosecutors, who launched an investigation in 2017 for potential lobbying violations by Agusta’s Christopher Sirkis and other company executives pursuing the county helicopter deal. That case closed without charges in late 2018, a time frame long enough that the statute of limitations for some potential crimes had passed.

Miami-Dade’s ethics board settled with Sirkis, who is no longer with Agusta and could not be reached Wednesday. He paid a $6,000 fine for unregistered lobbying and “cone of silence” violations for improper contact with county employees during a procurement process.

Investigators found that Sirkis met with selection committee members and fire department administrators at a conference in Los Angeles and at the Fort Lauderdale boat show. The ethics report also found Sirkis exchanged 65 text messages with a selection committee member at a time when all communication had to take place in public forums available to other bidders.

“Notwithstanding the hurdles encountered in this investigation,” Jose Arrojo, director of the ethics commission, wrote in the Aug. 23 report, “there is an overwhelming appearance of impropriety by all individuals [that were the] subject of this investigation.”

William Hunt, head of the Agusta manufacturing division based in Philadelphia, told commissioners at the Sept. 12 hearing that the company fired Sirkis.

“We have a very strong ethics policy, and our expectations of our employees are very high,” Hunt said. “I’m disappointed in the way that our employees interchanged activity with Miami-Dade.”

At the same hearing, Tara Smith, head of purchasing for Miami-Dade, told commissioners that while Bell won recommendations from selection committees, that was only a green light to begin talks with the company. When a deal couldn’t be reached, Miami-Dade turned to the second-place finisher, Agusta.

Gimenez told commissioners he thought the original recommendations were in error, since Agusta makes a superior helicopter and should be purchased even if the price was higher.

“It would have been much easier for us to go to Bell,” said Gimenez, a former Miami fire chief. “We’re going to be criticized. But at the end of the day, we need to go with a [more] capable aircraft that will save lives in the end.”

This story was originally published October 3, 2019 at 6:00 AM.