Contractors who duck subpoenas issued by the D.C. Council would be barred from receiving new deals with the city for five years under legislation introduced this week.
Ward 5 Councilman Harry Thomas Jr. proposed the bill after two construction managers, one closely tied to Mayor Adrian Fenty, advised through an attorney that they would not submit to a council subpoena on the date requested, citing scheduling conflicts.
“Because the accountability of our residents’ taxpayer dollars appears not to be a priority for certain contractors, this bill will act as an either an incentive to get meaningful cooperation or to weed out bad actors for five years who decide not to be accountable for their actions or the millions of taxpayer dollars we are giving them,” Thomas said Tuesday.
The issue at hand is roughly $100 million in questionably awarded and soon-to-be awarded deals for parks and recreation projects. Thomas chairs the Committee on Libraries, Parks and Recreation.
The Fenty administration, through a memorandum of understanding among three executive agencies, used the quasi-independent D.C. Housing Authority to award those contracts and outside the standard procurement process. The deals, most of which are valued at more than $1 million, were not submitted to the council for approval as required by law.
Four council committees are jointly investigating the process through which those contracts were doled out.
Two subpoenas were initially rejected. One was for Omar Karim, owner of Banneker Ventures and a Fenty fraternity brother, whose firm was hired to oversee the construction of roughly 19 recreational facilities. The other was for Thomas Regan of Regan Associates, Banneker’s partner.
A. Scott Bolden, Banneker’s attorney, informed the council Nov. 24 that neither Karim nor Regan could testify on Dec. 2, the date initially floated.
“Councilmember Thomas, my client, Banneker nor Regan have never failed nor have we ever said we would not appear — we merely indicated that we could not appear on that subpoena date and that we had some concerns about the info requested in the subpoena,” Bolden wrote to Thomas on Tuesday.
While the council investigates and castigates the intra-agency MOUs that allowed millions of dollars to flow to Banneker, Fenty has signed an executive order easing the way for his subordinates to enter into more.
Department heads, the order states, are authorized to strike deals with any other department “for materials, supplies, equipment, work, or services of any kind.” The order enables agency chiefs to avoid the “administrative burden” that is the procurement office, said Sean Madigan, a Fenty spokesman. It was “just a coincidence,” he said, and not related to the DPR controversy.
