California High Speed Rail Authority Broke Law By Contract Award Without A Bid
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Not only is the ObamaRail going to cost nearly $100 billion to build here in California, the authority tasked to build it is breaking the law before anything has been built. From Palo Alto Online:
The agency charged with building a high-speed rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles violated state law when it awarded contracts for information-technology services without going through the mandatory bidding process, according to a report released Tuesday by State Auditor Elaine Howle.
The audit is a follow-up to the Bureau of State Audits’ April 2010 report, a scathing survey titled “High-Speed Rail Authority: It Risks Delays or an Incomplete System Because of Inadequate Planning, Weak Oversight, and Lax Contract Management.” The new audit offers a mixed picture of the $98.5 billion project. While it credits the California High-Speed Rail Authority with implementing four of the previous audit’s nine recommendations from last year, it also faults the agency for lax contract management and a flawed business plan.
Among the report’s most damning findings is its conclusion that the authority engaged in “inappropriate contracting practices” involving information-technology services. The agency split its $3.1 million IT contract into 13 individual contracts with one vendor, the company Paperless Knowledge, and awarded these contracts to the vendor without obtaining proper bids, the audit found. The State Contract Manual, the report notes, “expressly forbids agencies from splitting contracts to avoid competitive bidding requirements and purchasing thresholds for any series of related services that would normally be combined and bid as one job.”
“As a result of the Authority’s actions, we believe that it violated the prohibitions set forth in the ‘State Contracting Manual.’ Further, the nature of the problems we discovered suggests that the Authority needs to significantly improve its internal controls to ensure that it effectively manages its contracts,” the report states.
In its response to the audit, the authority stated that it will develop procedures to detect and prevent contract splitting and that it has already “significantly revised the contract administration manual to ensure more effective management of the contract management process.” It is also holding discussions with California Technology Agency (as the office of the state’s Chief Information Officer is called) about possible service options…
This has disaster written all over it, and that is because the Democrat Party is pushing a $100 billion project nobody wants but them. Kill the ObamaRail and and kill it now.
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