Review Dave May Contracting Inc Battle Ground Wa
Every year the New Orleans City Quango awards contracts worth millions of dollars to the lawyers, engineers and accountants who piece of work with it in regulating Entergy New Orleans and Entergy Louisiana.
Some of the consultants have worked for the council for more than 20 years.
Their contracts, the largest doled out by the council, full more than $6 one thousand thousand this twelvemonth. The regulated companies reimburse the quango for the consultants' bills, using money they get from customers.
Councilwoman Shelley Midura has been looking for a cheaper solution, but as this week's council meeting showed, other council members are resisting a modify.
Members such equally Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Cynthia Willard-Lewis say the consultants' work has saved customers billions of dollars on their electricity and gas bills and in that location is no reason to jettison them for the sake of saving a few million dollars. Being penny-wise, they contend, could be pound-foolish.
Midura says other consultants or even city employees possibly could do the piece of work but every bit well. If there is a cheaper mode to achieve similar results, the council should take it, she says.
The argument is not new.
In 1993, the watchdog Alliance for Affordable Energy charged that the quango'southward Utility Commission and its consultants had run upward nearly $500,000 in unnecessary expenses, including starting time-class plane tickets, posh hotel rooms and lavish meals.
Then-Councilman Joseph Giarrusso dedicated the expenses, maxim the consultants had delivered $iii.viii billion in savings to customers in 10 years by avoiding charge per unit increases. The disputed $500,000, Giarrusso said, was "a very small cost to pay for a service rendered to the ratepayers of this city."
Every bit information technology must do every five years, the council recently requested applications from firms interested in getting the utility contracts. Five firms already under contract replied. Only two others expressed involvement, and neither appeared probable to unseat the incumbents.
When Midura this calendar week proposed extending the solicitation by two weeks in hopes of getting more "robust competition, " she ran into a buzz saw of opposition led by Willard-Lewis, who said the city'due south asking had been widely advertised and in that location was no reason to reopen it.
Afterwards extensive fence, Midura'south request was canonical 4-ii, with Willard-Lewis and James Carter voting no. Hedge-Morrell was in Republic of cuba with Mayor Ray Nagin, but she has voted with Willard-Lewis on all recent utility matters.
This week's dispute, though, was only the latest in a recent series of battles over how the city should regulate Entergy.
At Midura's urging, the quango voted in December to support the idea of hiring experts to review the council's entire approach to regulation and recommend whether at that place might be a better way, such as having much of the work performed by council employees rather than exterior lawyers and engineers who earn up to $495 an hour.
northward May, however, the quango rejected Midura's recommendation to hire the Rand Corp. and the National Regulatory Inquiry Institute to perform the management review at a cost of $130,000. Rand and the National Regulatory Enquiry Establish had filed the simply acceptable response to the urban center's request for proposals. Other council members complained well-nigh the cost of their proposal and the fact no one else had submitted a bid.
Midura's backup plan was to ask the urban center inspector full general's part to perform the aforementioned sort of review. Notwithstanding, the office later on said information technology couldn't undertake the review until at to the lowest degree 2010, leaving the quango little choice for now simply to proceed relying on outside consultants.
The principal current consultants, with their maximum compensation for 2009, are the Washington police house of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal LLP, $3.3 meg; the Legend Consulting Group of Denver, which handles engineering science and technical matters, $one.95 meg; Wilkerson and Henry LLC, a local constabulary firm, $600,000; and the local accounting firms of Bruno & Tervalon LLP and Pailet, Meunier & LeBlanc LLP, $250,000 each.
The council awards contracts to its consultants for one year, with the possibility of four one-year renewals. Considering this is the fifth year of the latest cycle, the current contracts all will expire December. 31 and cannot exist renewed.
However, when Midura presented a typhoon of a solicitation for new consultants in August, the Utility Committee rejected it. Hedge-Morrell and Willard-Lewis complained they had never seen the certificate before, and they and Midura traded charges about who was playing politics.
Unlike some council committees, where members nigh invariably take their cues from the chairman, Midura has become a minority on her own committee, oftentimes ambivalent with Hedge-Morrell and Willard-Lewis. In this case, Carter, the terminal committee member, who has been less critical of Midura, sided with Hedge-Morrell and Willard-Lewis.
A few weeks afterwards, the committee canonical a revised solicitation with changes demanded by Hedge-Morrell and Willard-Lewis, including a requirement that applicants describe their "cognition and experience with Entergy New Orleans' system agreement and disaster recovery matters" -- a provision that clearly favored the firms already working for the council.
That solicitation, issued Sept. iii, drew the modest number of responses Midura cited this week.
When Midura ran for the quango in 2006 confronting incumbent Jay Batt, she accused Batt of beingness in Entergy's pocket and promised to take a hard look at the utility advisers' contracts. After taking role, however, she became convinced the consultants were doing an outstanding job and were saving Entergy customers far more money than they were paid.
"I have the utmost confidence in their abilities, " Midura said in March 2007 of Sullivan & Worcester, the Washington police firm that was and then the council's atomic number 82 adviser. The firm "did an amazing job on the settlement agreement this past year," she said, referring to a pact on post-Katrina charge per unit increases.
The Washington lawyers who worked with the council, led by Clint Vince, later moved to the Sonnenschein firm -- at least the fourth firm Vince has been affiliated with since the council showtime hired him in 1983.
In August 2007, Midura was unexpectedly thrust into the chairmanship of the Utility Commission when Councilman Oliver Thomas resigned from office. In her new office, she seemed to grow more than skeptical almost the size of the consultants' contracts.
In proposing the next year that an exterior firm should review the council's regulatory procedures, she said such an action should counter any suspicions that the selection of consultants would be influenced by "subjective, political influence."
In April 2007, at Midura's urging, council members all agreed not to accept any more entrada contributions from either Entergy or whatsoever of the council'southward utility consultants, though the resolution was not legally binding. Some of the consultants had for years been big donors to quango members' campaigns.
In Feb 2008, Arnie Fielkow, Hedge-Morrell and Willard-Lewis recused themselves from voting on the Pailet house's contract because the business firm had done work for them or their campaigns. They did not recuse themselves from voting for the same consultant's 2009 renewal, withal.
In recent debates, Midura worsened her already bad relations with Hedge-Morrell and Willard-Lewis by pointing out the non-recusals. Although claiming she was "non questioning the integrity of my colleagues, " Midura said that "mixing private and quango contracts . . . allows a perception of predetermined effect based on personal preferences."
This week, Midura accused Willard-Lewis of "intellectual dishonesty" in arguing that the quango should be satisfied with the small-scale number of responses to its latest solicitation when a few months earlier Willard-Lewis had said the lack of multiple responses was a reason to turn down the Rand-NRRI bid to report the council'southward regulatory procedures.
Willard-Lewis said at that place was no reason to recollect that reopening the latest solicitation would produce more responses, and she and Carter complained that Midura had not taken her proposal to the Utility Committee -- where information technology likely would have died.
Carter also said he feared that reopening the request could expose the city to legal liability because the initial responses are at present public documents and later applicants could examine them.
Deputy City Attorney Fred Wild said he saw no such danger because the solicitation never guaranteed confidentiality. "There is no basis on which a proposer tin merits his or her rights have been violated, " he said. Carter, also a lawyer, said he disagreed.
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Bruce Eggler can be reached at beggler@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3320.
Source: https://www.nola.com/news/politics/article_93fe3891-464a-5dc3-82aa-176ac3de1099.html
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