Three years after FIU bridge collapse, can MCM keep its MIA construction contract?

MCM, the contractor that oversaw the construction of the bridge that collapsed at Florida International University three years ago, is fighting to keep an airport contract with Miami-Dade County after a rival company won the initial bidding competition.

The contest for the $70 million, five-year contract revolves around whether Miami-Dade will keep MCM in place to oversee small projects at Miami International Airport, such as bathroom renovations and refurbishing the American Airlines Admiral’s Club lounge. MCM has held the contract since 2011, and oversees the smaller construction companies and specialty firms that do the work.

Known as the “Miscellaneous Construction Contract,” it has sparked the first high-profile procurement fight since the November elections ushered in six new members on the 13-seat county commission, along with a new mayor, Daniella Levine Cava.

Last week, her office released a memo recommending commissioners award the MIA contract to a joint venture formed by two other construction companies with existing county contracts, Suffolk and NV2A. The mayor’s recommendation followed the scoring of a selection panel, which put the Suffolk/NV2A group in first place and MCM in second, ahead of the remaining six bidders.

The recommendations aren’t binding, leaving county commissioners to decide who gets the work.

MCM claims county staffers made several errors in putting the company in second place, and is asking the commission to overrule the recommendation. Last week, the commission’s airport committee narrowly forwarded the recommendation to award the contract to Suffolk/NV2A. A final vote before the full board could happen Tuesday.

The collapse of the FIU bridge

Pitched lobbying fights over procurement scoring isn’t remarkable before the Miami-Dade County Commission. What’s notable in this fight is it captures a new phase in MCM’s comeback from the bridge calamity, which killed six people on March 15, 2018.

After the collapse, MCM went through bankruptcy reorganization and agreed to a $103 million settlement with victims. Federal investigators largely blamed the collapse on design flaws by the project’s engineers, Figg Bridge Engineers out of Tallahassee. Reports by the National Transportation Safety Board also cited MCM, FIU and the Florida Department of Transportation for not reacting appropriately to cracks forming on the structure and for not closing Southwest Eighth Street below.

Before the bridge collapse, MCM was one of Miami-Dade’s most influential contractors, with company executives who were reliable donors in county races and a track record of commission backing.

In 2017, the commission unanimously voted to protest the award of an $800 million state contract to an MCM rival to build a new bridge on I-395. The Munilla family, longtime owners of MCM, were close to the former county mayor, Carlos Gimenez, whose two sons worked for the company at various times.

The bridge calamity didn’t end MCM’s ability to win Miami-Dade contracts. In 2019, commissioners accepted a Gimenez recommendation to extend MCM’s construction contract at MIA, and declined to ask questions when the item came up for a vote. Levine Cava, a former commissioner, was at the meeting and joined the board in letting the MCM item pass without discussion.

At the time, executives at the family-owned MCM didn’t address the commission. Two years later, several members of the Munilla family helped make MCM’s case and urged commissioners to overrule county staff in making the final decision on the MIA contract.

Fighting for the contract

“We’re here today over decisions your procurement team got resoundingly wrong,” Daniel Munilla, the company’s president, said during the April 13 meeting of the commission’s Airports and Economic Development Committee.

The FIU bridge incident wasn’t mentioned in the county report recommending the Suffolk entity over MCM.

Still, Munilla addressed it in his comments, saying MCM delivered a settlement package for victims without an extensive court fight and has continued government work after the collapse, including work on a pedestrian bridge for the Pentagon under its construction contract at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba.

“We’ve gotten a lot of new work,” he said, “and we continue to live up to our standards of building excellence.”

Representatives of the Suffolk firm called MCM’s complaints groundless, and an effort to get around the results of an impartial selection process. “You have an opportunity today to actually stop the circus,” said Brian May, a lobbyist for the Sulfolk and NV2A partnership, which is called Suffolk/NV2A. “A circus that, albeit within their rights, has been created by MCM.”

The main dispute centers on how Miami-Dade should consider the track record of the entity created in 2017 by Suffolk, the Boston-based company with a Southeast division in Miami that built the Miami-Dade Children’s Courthouse project, and NV2A, a Miami company that’s won other county projects, including construction of the Norwegian Cruise Line terminal at PortMiami. It was founded in 2016 by former Odebrecht USA president Gilberto Neves and others.

On the Children’s Courthouse, Suffolk didn’t meet the county’s requirement for hiring small businesses, falling short about $4.2 million, according to an April 8 letter from the county’s Small Business Development Division.

Miami-Dade’s Internal Services Department, which oversees contract competitions, concluded the joint entity formed by Suffolk and NV2A didn’t need to address Suffolk’s small-business shortfall. The division also said in a separate April 8 letter that Suffolk had submitted a hiring plan to make up the deficit as part of another county contract at the port.

“Our argument is that it’s not good policy to allow small business offenders and other scofflaws to set up subsidiary companies... to avoid their obligations to the county,” said MCM lobbyist Eric Zichella.

At the committee meeting, Commissioner Oliver Gilbert said he was astounded Miami-Dade policy allowed the selection committee to consider Suffolk’s experience as a positive in the MIA contest but didn’t also consider the firm’s small-business shortfall.

He also sided with MCM on another complaint regarding the Suffolk/NV2A group not being penalized for having outstanding occupational licensing taxes (known as the local business tax receipt) from 2017 and 2018 when it submitted its 2019 tax payment. The timing put the joint venture out of compliance with rules governing when a bidder qualifies for local-company advantages in the procurement process. Miami-Dade requires those local-business taxes be current for at least a year before a bid is submitted. Miami-Dade received the MIA bids in January 2020.

“This process was not clean,” Gilbert said.

Should the Suffolk/NV2A venture be declared not a local entity, that would give MCM first dibs on negotiating a contract with the Levine Cava administration that would then go before the commission. MCM is now short for Magnum Construction Management, the formal name for a company formerly known as Munilla Construction Management

However, in an April 15 email to Munilla, Oren Rosenthal, an assistant county attorney, revealed a new twist in MCM’s objection over Suffolk/NV2A being considered a local company.

Rosenthal wrote other factors can be considered when deciding whether a firm is local, and that late tax payments aren’t disqualifying. In the same email, he produced an April 2017 memo from a different assistant county attorney, Annery Pulgar Alfonso, that said a fuel company, Pro Energy, didn’t qualify for local preference because it hadn’t paid the required local business tax a year before its bid submission for a county fuel contract.

“That opinion is inconsistent with the advice from our office both prior to, and after, the 2017 Opinion was issued,“ Rosenthal wrote.

Representatives for Suffolk/NV2A claim MCM has its own issues complying with bidding criteria, claiming multiple executives cited in its bid package as proof of experience have since left the company. Zichella called the allegations “smoke and mirrors.”

The Levine Cava administration maintains the contest for the contract followed the rules and shouldn’t be derailed. Namita Uppal, the county’s chief procurement officer, told commissioners at the committee that friction is common when a longtime vendor ends up on the losing end of a bid.

“It is hard for anyone to accept that they are going to a lose a contract,” she said last week. “I don’t think there is any merit to these issues.”

This story was originally published April 19, 2021 at 6:07 PM.