Explanation needed on desal spending
Monterey Herald
01/10/2012
Suppose you hired a contractor to build something for you, a house perhaps. You start paying him but then you find out he has made some fishy payments to a government official in order to obtain the building permit for your project.
As a result, the construction is postponed for months and months, maybe even indefinitely.
Then, although you have already paid him quite a bit of money, the contractor comes back and wants more money, mostly for work done after you discovered the funny business with the permit.
Do you pay up? Probably not.
But if you're Monterey County, apparently so.
At least that's how it seems with Monterey County officials scheduled today to authorize county officials to borrow more money to pay about $700,000 to the project manager for the possibly moribund Regional Desalination Project and to pay other project-related bills of $400,000 plus.
There's more than one reason for the unsettled nature of the desalination project, but the biggest was the disclosure early last year that Steve Collins, a member of the county's Water Resources Agency board, was being paid by the project manager, RMC Water and Engineering, for work that most others thought was being done voluntarily.
Worse, Collins had helped RMC get the project management contract in the first place. The District Attorney's Office considers the payments to Collins fishy enough that it has indicted him on felony conflict-of-interest charges.
Though we don't have access to many details, largely because so much has gone on in confidential talks, we suggest that RMC not be paid for work performed after Collins was hired, at least not until the criminal case is adjudicated and the county has offered a detailed and meaningful public accounting of the $700,000 in invoices and related legal work.
Instead, we'd suggest that the county tell RMC to file a claim with its professional liability insurance carrier so it can pay the county and other project partners for the troubles caused by the secret arrangement with Collins.
In at least one of its previous contracts with the county, RMC explicitly agreed not to engage in any conflicts of interest. Presciently, perhaps, the project management contract doesn't contain such a provision but it does require RMC to indemnify the county and other desal partners in case of "wrongful acts" on its part. It carries $5 million in liability insurance for that purpose.
At one point, last March, county supervisors put a cap on the amount the county would spend on the desalination project from that point on—$286,000. Now, they say that's not what they meant. They say they meant they would actually spend no more than $286,000 but would commit to spending more, considerably more, later.
