For MCM investigation, ‘political stakes’ a concern when case almost ended in 2019

In late 2019, investigators for the Miami-Dade Office of the Inspector General wanted to wrap up a probe into side construction deals an MCM manager had with subcontractors he supervised at Miami International Airport.

Patra Liu, general counsel at the Inspector General’s office, thought investigators were letting the company off easy.

“I have major issues with this,” Liu wrote in a handwritten note to Felix Jimenez, then the deputy inspector general wanting to close out the case. “This is not some trivial matter...”

She noted their office six months earlier issued a scathing report about misdeeds by the manager on a school system electrical contract.

“Perhaps this isn’t as bad,” Liu wrote to Jimenez, “but the political stakes of this is much higher.”

The notation in blue ink is now at the center of MCM’s effort to keep its $14 million-a-year MIA contract, three years after a bridge it was building collapsed at Florida International University, killing six people.

While county commissioners voted to negotiate a new deal with MCM in early May, that decision got derailed weeks later when the Office of the Inspector General released the public report Liu was pushing for in 2019.

The May 12 report cited “an egregious lack of managerial oversight” by MCM for letting its top manager, Alberto Calderin, launch a construction business with companies he also supervised at MIA.

Eric Zichella, an MCM lobbyist, pointed to draft versions of the May 12 report showing Liu added the language the day before the document went public, part of what he called a “politically motivated” effort to doom the company’s contract renewal.

“I think the OIG had a political ax to grind against MCM for some reason,” he said in an interview. “But it’s totally improper for them to carry out political retribution through their investigations.”

For OIG, a question of ‘political stakes’

In a statement, the Inspector General’s Office said the 2019 feedback from Liu — now reporting to Jimenez, named head of the office last year — showed her spotting a flaw in findings that otherwise would have been too soft on MCM.

“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.”

The statement said Liu’s note on “political stakes” didn’t refer to the FIU bridge collapse but the extra attention that followed the county’s small-business contracts at MIA. This year, subcontractors filled the chambers of the Board of County Commissioners during multiple meetings urging them to keep MCM in place to allow the flow of county work to continue without interruption.

“The OIG is very aware, having reviewed the program for many years, that this is a contract of import and significance to the community, small businesses, and the” commission, the statement read.

The 2019 draft report concluded there was no need for more action by the OIG, since Calderin wound down his side construction operation after the probe began in 2016 to the “satisfaction” of the county’s Aviation Department.

In her notes, Liu asked for more investigation, including whether the airport allowed Calderin to continue supervising the MIA contract. The Aviation Department had allowed the arrangement to continue, and MCM included Calderin as its top manager in the bid proposal filed early last year to compete for the small-jobs construction contract it has held since 2011.

That arrangement proved problematic in June 2020, when the Inspector General circulated a private draft of a future public report of its findings, including recommendations for preventing future conflicts of interest in private contract managers.

In response, the county’s aviation director at the time, Lester Sola, said MCM agreed to remove Calderin from managing the airport contract. But county procurement rules generally prohibit companies from switching out executives listed in contract proposals, leaving MCM with Calderin in its bid package and waiting for a public report from the Inspector General.

MCM versus Mastec in MIA contract fight

By the time the report came out May 12, MCM was on its way to a contract extension at MIA. Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava had recommended the airport ditch the outsourcing contract and manage the small construction jobs itself, but commissioners, in a veto-proof 9-4 vote on May 4, rejected that idea and instructed the mayor to negotiate a new deal with MCM.

After the OIG report came out, Levine Cava again tried to stall the MCM contract extension. County lawyers said MCM should be disqualified from negotiations, and the mayor sent commissioners a memo saying she would negotiate a new deal with a lower-ranked bidder, MasTec subsidiary Lemartec, if the board didn’t intervene.

“There are statements in here that are fairly strong,” Jimmy Morales, Levine Cava’s chief operating officer, said of the OIG report during a July 13 meeting of the commission’s Airport and Economic Development committee. “We did not feel comfortable moving forward without bringing back to you our concerns.”

MCM’s criticism of the OIG report included allegations of back-dated records. Zichella released screenshots of internal OIG documents needed to extend an investigation another six months. Electronic meta data of the PDF documents show three dated 2020 and 2021 were created on July 15 — the same day an OIG staffer sent the documents to MCM.

Marie Perikles, the OIG lawyer who handles public-records requests, said the date tags reflect when she downloaded the documents from the office’s new electronic case-management system. Extensions filed before 2020 used handwritten signatures, but Perikles said the new versions do not. “These records have not been modified or altered, although some have been converted to PDFs,” she said.

A test of MCM’s comeback after FIU bridge collapse

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 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 engineers 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.

Miami-Dade endorsed MCM’s safety record

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 replacement 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.

While the FIU bridge hasn’t been part of the MCM debate in the commission chambers, the Office of the Inspector General’s report divided the chambers at the July 13 meeting of the Airport committee.

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 Calderin.

“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?”

This story was originally published July 20, 2021 at 9:57 AM.