D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles said Friday that the donation of a firetruck and ambulance to a beach town in the Dominican Republic met all of the city’s rules for the disposal of surplus property, but both vehicles are back in the District to “assure that this transaction raises no further public concerns.”
The donation was “legal and totally proper” and “in the service of important and legitimate public purposes,” Nickles wrote in a three-page statement.
“There was no attempt to hide this disposition,” he said. “The transaction was facilitated through formal rulemaking which was publicly noticed in the District register. All District rules and procedures appear to have been followed.”
The Examiner has reported for more than a week that D.C. quietly donated a surplus firetruck and ambulance to the nonprofit Peaceoholics, rather than auctioning the property as it usually does. The Peaceoholics, a nonprofit anti-violence organization, then sent the vehicles toward the town of Sosua on the north Dominican coast. No city official took credit for the gift or could explain it, raising numerous questions about the deal.
“If all rules and regulations were followed, we need new rules and regulations,” said Ward 3 D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh, who has oversight of the Office of Contracting and Procurement.
Dorothy Brizill of D.C. Watch also wasn’t buying Nickles’ explanation.
“Peter Nickles and the Office of the Attorney General just don’t get it,” Brizill said Friday. “This is the theft of D.C. government property just as it would be if it were stealing actual dollars.”
The 1998 Seagrave Pumper was purchased for $240,859 and the 2002 Ford E-450 ambulance was bought for $75,132. Both vehicles “had reached the end of their useful life,” Nickles said.
The AG claims that several local nonprofits, including the Peaceoholics, have taken at-risk D.C. teens to the Dominican Republic for years for “sports-based and cross-cultural activities.” Sosua’s mayor, Vladimir Cespedes, requested the District’s help to replace the town’s 40-year-old firetruck during a visit to the nation’s capital in 2007, Nickles wrote.
Deputy Fire Chief Ronald Gill Jr., head of the D.C. fire department’s apparatus division, traveled to Sosua for six days in late January — and charged the trip to taxpayers — “to confirm their need and assess their infrastructure and capabilities.” The vehicles were properly declared surplus by the Office of Contracting and Procurement, Nickles said, and left the District late last month for the Port of Miami.
They returned Wednesday.
Peaceoholics and others, Nickles said, “were operating with the very best of intentions and with the interests of not only the District but also of those in need in Sosua in mind.”
“It is a shame that this humanitarian gesture was not able to be timely completed,” he wrote.
