The Allegheny County Sanitary Authority has plenty of leeway when it hires professionals for engineering work. Although it’s a public agency, it doesn’t always have to take the lowest bidder; it can consider key factors including a firm’s expertise.
All the more reason why Alcosan should put out requests for proposals whenever it is making a decision on how to spend millions of ratepayers’ dollars. That didn’t happen in 2008 when Alcosan hired the Los Angeles-based engineering firm AECOM to coordinate the overhaul of the regional sewer system.
As reporters Chris Potter and Rich Lord explained in last Sunday’s Post-Gazette, when Alcosan began planning for federally mandated upgrades to prevent sewage overflows into local waterways, it divided the project into seven sections. Contracts for two of them had been awarded by 2007 when Alcosan issued requests for qualifications from potential engineering firms, and then it put eight firms, including AECOM, on a short list for the five remaining sections.
AECOM got the biggest contract, one that had not been advertised, to coordinate the work among those sections. It was to be paid $10.4 million but, after three years and $9.1 million in payments, AECOM’s contract has been twice expanded, and the company had received $15.1 million by this spring
No one is questioning AECOM’s expertise. Alcosan officials and those from the Congress of Neighboring Communities, which has been involved in the project, and some of the 83 municipalities that are part of the sewer system give AECOM high marks. But the awarding of a $10 million contract that has already paid out 50 percent more than that, all without a public process, is worth questioning.
Alcosan’s executive director, Arletta Scott Williams, said it doesn’t always make sense for the authority to seek other bidders, and she maintained that was the case with AECOM. Nonetheless, she said Alcosan soon will be issuing new policies for contracting for professional services. She said the changes would not have altered the decision to hire AECOM but that it would have been “documented differently.”
Until those changes are known, it’s hard to tell whether they will be enough to address concerns about Alcosan’s contracting practices.
The authority should not need to be reminded of the public’s enormous stake in its decisions. The Alcosan sewer fixes are expected to cost more than $3 billion, with ratepayers seeing annual increases in their bills to pay for much of that work. Even more broadly, the cleanliness of the region’s public waterways depends on Alcosan getting this job done correctly and as quickly as possible.
It must act openly in a manner that gives the public confidence that it will get its money’s worth.
First Published: September 27, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
