A company co-founded by mayoral friend and fraternity brother Sinclair Skinner allegedly submitted bids for lucrative D.C. city parks contracts weeks after the company had already begun the work.
Sinclair Skinner’s Liberty Engineering and Design also claimed to have nearly two dozen expert employees when, in fact, the company consisted of Skinner and his partner, according to testimony in a public hearing Wednesday.
Skinner has become a key figure in an expanding contracts scandal involving some $50 million in public funds given to build and fix parks and playgrounds around the District. D.C. Council members want to know whether there were any improprieties that netted Skinner sub-contracts through a company controlled by Omar Karim, another friend and fraternity brother of Mayor Adrian Fenty.
Veteran litigator Robert Trout, who is leading the council’s investigation of the contracts, said during Wednesday’s hearing that Skinner’s company was engaged by Banneker to do parks work in May 2009, a full month before a public solicitation for the work went out. Skinner’s company eventually applied for the job in June 2009, claiming in its bid letter that its “full and part-time” employees had expertise in, among other areas, marketing and a legal department.
Among the areas of expertise of its “full and part time employees” listed on a June 2009 letter bidding on the parks contracts, Liberty claimed to have “a legal department,” said Robert Trout, a veteran litigator probing the parks deals for the council.
Skinner has testified previously that his company made extensive use of contractors but only had two full-time employees. Pressed by Trout, he said he didn’t write the June 2009 bid and didn’t recall what experts were referred to.
When Trout pressed Skinner on whether they actually had any legal or other experts on staff at the time of the bid, Skinner’s lawyer, A. Scott Bolden, objected and a testy exchange followed.
Skinner maintains that there was nothing wrong in the contracts his company was given.
“We wanted to make sure that the people of the District — the ones paying the taxes — got the best possible service and that’s what we provided,” Skinner said.
