Feature

April 10, 08

Parking Wars

Several companies are vying for a lucrative Miami Beach parking contract amid political intrigue.

By Rebecca Wakefield

For the past nine years, the city-owned parking garages on Miami Beach have been run by one company, Standard Parking. Most people neither know nor care about this, since we spend most of our time just trying to find a decent parking space.

But for Standard Parking, these have been good years. The contract is worth about $3 million a year, which isn’t peanuts to anybody. In December, however, a dark cloud fell over parking attendants all across the city.

At a Miami Beach City Commission meeting, the mayor and commissioners voted not to automatically renew the company’s contract. They decided instead to put the contract out for a request for proposals. On April 16, commissioners will consider whether to keep Standard Parking or go with one of the other companies that offered a bid.

“In the spirit of competition, I would ask this contract be put out for competitive bid,” said Commissioner Jonah Wolfson, whose idea this was. “In addition, this contractor, Standard Parking, its local hierarchy, recently has been mired in private ethics issues.”

Here’s where the story gets interesting. When Wolfson said “local hierarchy,” he meant Frank Pintado. Pintado manages Standard Parking’s Miami Beach operations.

At least that’s his day job. In the completely self-absorbed and incestuous world of Beach politics, however, Pintado is also what you would call a political operative. For years, he has raised money and solicited support for various candidates.

Pintado is a colorful character. His friends consider him a wily politico useful to many a candidate. His enemies can barely say his name without spitting. He’s been accused of everything from brokering the votes of elderly Hispanics in certain condos to issuing vile anonymous mailers and e-mails attacking the opponents of candidates he supports.

Last year, in fact, he was investigated by the Miami-Dade County Commission on Ethics and the Public Trust for allegedly sending out a fake city poll showing that the candidates he supported were likely to win. The ethics commission also looked into whether Pintado had anything to do with a sexist, racist and homophobic campaign flier attacking several candidates. Pintado said he wasn’t involved. The case was closed when an important witness died of natural causes before he could testify.

In 2004, when Standard’s contract was last renewed, Quik Park of Florida owner Hank Sopher filed a bid protest alleging Pintado had violated a city ordinance banning vendors with city contracts from contributing money or services to Miami Beach political campaigns. At the time, Pintado was helping then-Commissioners Matti Herrera Bower, Simon Cruz and Luis Garcia with their respective campaigns. Sopher, who ran against Cruz for commissioner in 2003, felt he lost the parking contract because of political favoritism.

Anyway, Pintado has long been considered by critics, as one city hall insider put it to me, “one of the sleazeballs who grease their way in.” In any case, Pintado’s fortunes took a tumble when none of his candidates won their races in November.

Wolfson, a vigorous, shoe-leather-burning campaigner, was victorious despite Pintado’s efforts (real or imagined) on behalf of Luis Salom. And so it is not all that surprising that he would suggest perhaps the city ought to look at whether it was getting its money’s worth from Pintado’s employer.

Wolfson couldn’t specifically address the RFP process because it falls under the city’s “cone of silence” provision, aimed essentially at preventing any city officials with decision-making powers from discussing a contract up for consideration (unless in a public forum).

But he said his intent from the get-go was to save the taxpayers money. “Any time you have a contract that size, it makes sense to try to save money,” he said. “I’m going to abide by the RFP process and do what is in the best interest of taxpayers.”

The RFP process the city follows is to issue notice that it has a wad of money burning a hole in its pocket for some desired good or service. In this case, seven companies submitted proposals.

The city manager, Jorge Gonzalez, appointed a seven-member selection committee to look at the proposals and recommend its top choices, based on several criteria. The criteria included experience, qualifications, hourly billing rates, past performance and a few other considerations.

On March 5, according to documents the city provided to the SunPost, the selection committee, composed mostly of residents active in city government, heard hours of testimony from the companies in a less interesting version of the grueling process American Idol contestants go through.

Each committee member then awarded points and picked their favorite company. No one company got a majority of votes. Standard Parking got three votes, while Impark and LAZ Parking each garnered two votes.

According to one of the committee members, the group kept voting to try to get a majority and, when that failed, decided to just offer its top three choices, with Impark and LAZ running first and second and Standard Parking trailing at third.

Alan Fishman, an attorney who also chairs the city’s Parking and Transportation Committee, said that he thought Standard Parking deserved the nod because it had the most votes, but it was not to be.

“Honestly, I think Standard should have gotten it because they were cheaper than everyone else,” he told me. “They had the experience, and when we asked the parking director, he said there was no reason to get rid of them. So from the criteria we were given, it was a clear choice.”

The city’s parking director, Saul Frances, told me that what he said was that Standard had done a decent job of performing the contract. “I still stand by that statement,” he said, “But whatever operator they award it to, we will work with them.”

Soon after the selection committee made its hotly debated decision, a flood of public records requests began to rush into the inbox of Gus Lopez, the city’s procurement director.

Although the requests came from an apparent variety of sources, Lopez suspected the origin of many was one or more of the unhappy companies. “I got a lot of fictitious names that I asked tech to trace -- Lance Armstrong, Bruce Lee,” he said with some exasperation. “There were a lot of different games being played. It’s a new world for me.”

This week, a story broke on www.citydebate.com, a site that focuses on community news pertaining to Miami Beach. The story essentially suggested that the RFP process had been rigged to ensure Standard Parking does not get the contract.

One relevant question the story (fed in large part by some of those public records requests) asked was why certain selection committee members had not ranked Standard Parking higher, given that the company had offered the lowest price.

The story’s analysis, which stated that over the course of the three-year contract Standard Parking would be $716,089 cheaper than Impark and $260,277 cheaper than LAZ Parking, mirrored the material Standard Parking provided to the selection committee, according to Lopez.

But Lopez said the reason Standard Parking was cheaper is because the company lowered its existing rate by more than $300,000 a year. He said some committee members felt the rate was artificially low. “Does that mean we’ve been overpaying for nine years?” he asked.

Anyway, when I called Pintado for comment, he declined, saying, “I’m not part of the RFP. I don’t want to get involved in this.”

So I went a little higher up and spoke to Tom Hagerman, chief operating officer of Standard Parking, a large national company based in Chicago. He explained that the reason the company could offer such a great price is that, after nine years, they’ve paid off the cost of equipment and could pass those savings to the city.

“After seeing the results, I do have some concerns on how we were scored and evaluated by certain members of the selection committee,” he said. “When you have the lowest rate and get lowest score, it would be nice to get in their brain and know why they scored us that low.”

Hagerman declined to speculate on the palace intrigue surrounding the RFP. “I don’t know why they decided to rebid,” he said. “We just want to be judged on our merits.

With our history and track record, we have proved ourselves. We hope we get an opportunity to continue to work for the city.”

Hope is still alive there, if barely. City Manager Jorge Gonzalez told me Wednesday that he has looked at the committee’s recommendations and asked staff to do more research on the question of billing rates. He will issue his recommendation to the city commission by Friday. The commission will consider the matter on April 16.

If the commission goes with the recommendation, the city would then open negotiations with the winning company, and could, Lopez said, ask for lower rates in the final contract.

Meanwhile, Pintado’s headaches are not over. No matter how this RFP shakes out, at least one commissioner is pushing for an ordinance that would surely curtail his extracurricular activities. Commissioner Saul Gross has long been concerned about the involvement of vendors in political campaigns.

He supported the ordinance that prevents vendors from contributing to Beach political campaigns and pushed for the one that prevents lobbyists and real estate developers who have pending zoning requests from soliciting donations for campaigns. Now he wants to tighten the regulations even more by making it illegal for vendors to even solicit donations.

In the past, there were concerns that going that far might impinge on the constitutional rights of the vendors, but Gross feels that the issue is worth testing again. He said as much in December when he voted to rebid the parking contract.

“If a vendor ordinance means anything, people who get [contracts] shouldn’t be so steeped in elections,” he told me. “From my point of view, vendors should not be able to solicit campaign contributions. It’s all about the money at the end of the day. If they can’t raise money for candidates, they lose a lot of their power.”

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com