Something smells rotten at the Florida Department of Transportation.
There's no other way to put it.
When FDOT awarded an $800 million contract for a "signature" I-395 bridge in Overtown that no local resident chose -- in fact, that every member of the local aesthetics review committee roundly rejected -- you just knew this Miami community north of the city's downtown had been screwed again.
But read this story through for yourself. Then tell me you don't think the FDOT bureaucrats had their thumb on the scale when they picked a bridge winner they virtually had to resuscitate and then change the rules to push over the finish line.
The whole idea for this bridge is to right the wrong done to Overtown in the 1960s, when the highway department came in and sliced apart this historic African-American community like a chef in a Ginsu commercial, running I-95 and I-395 clear through its urban fabric -- its churches, restaurants, residences, nightclubs and theaters.
I'm old enough to remember Overtown before and after the interstates. Trust me, the mess the highwaymen created inflicted such a blight, residents were paralyzed to fix it. Year after year the neighborhood slipped further into decay.
It took until this century and a rare 10-year National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) study for residents to win the promise of a "signature" bridge fix.
But still FDOT didn't get it. They went "cheap and cheerful," Miami barber Lenny Perez told me. "They were ready to screw us all over again."
And attorney Marc Sarnoff, a former city of Miami commissioner, said, "They showed up in Miami with plans to replace the I-395 atrocity with something equally terrible, another low-rise, segmental bridge, not a suspension bridge."
A handful of citizens sued -- after which FDOT agreed to build a "signature" bridge that would make the whole community proud. "That promise was enshrined in a settlement agreement assuring Miamians would get to determine the appearance of an iconic structure that would help define our community," Sarnoff said.
FDOT also created a five-member aesthetics review panel -- call it local people making sure they get the design and features they want; and a technical review panel to approve the engineering concepts.
In meeting after public meeting, FDOT officials assured residents the aesthetic review panel was the last word on design.
The bridge has been a very big deal for a lot of years leading up to May 15, when the winning bid was announced.
As the Miami Herald reported, bidders were expected to design extensive improvements at ground level, made possible "by raising the new expressway farther off the ground and drastically reducing the number of support piers, allowing sunlight to shine through for the first time in 50 years."
The winning plan for the bridge over Biscayne Boulevard: Six support arches of varying heights that sprout from the center of the elevated span toward its outer edges, a design meant to evoke a fountain.
The runner-up design preferred by the four-member panel of community members evaluating aesthetics consists of two scissor-like support towers meant to resemble dancers cavorting in front of the adjacent Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.
Here's where the selection process among five bidders started to veer off the Yellow Brick Road:
Of the five project bidders, international contractors Fluor and Astaldi and Miami-based MCM was the only team to score a perfect 5 of 5 in the local aesthetic review committee, and a total of 21 "Excellent" scores.
Only one other team got a 4 of 5 -- the super-majority vote required for a project to advance.
Not good enough for FDOT, apparently.
Because fewer than three teams earned a super-majority, FDOT lowered the standard and created a second tier of candidates.
Here's what I don't get -- and why I wish FDOT's District 6 Secretary Jim Wolfe had returned my phone calls: The eventual bid winner, Archer Western of Chicago and Miami's The de Moya Group, was moved into contention from this second tier, despite receiving “poor” and “fair” marks from the aesthetic review committee -- again, the local people who were promised they would be calling the shots.
Meanwhile, the public had no idea what was going on. FDOT's rules require a "cone of silence" around the bids to keep the process lobbyist- and politics-free. Never mind that they also shut out the biggest stakeholders, the residents.
"How can Miami-Dade County residents judge this?" said Michael Hernandez, spokesman for Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who had asked FDOT to make a public presentation on the three final proposals to the county and city commissions. "They have to be able to visually see it. The public should be able to see what all the proposals are. They should not be awarding it just on points."
And what talent did FDOT line up as a technical review committee for this $800 million project? A roadway engineer from Tallahassee and a construction manager.
Under this veil of ... uh, cone of silence ... the stage now was set for FDOT's bait and switch. The agency combined the technical and aesthetic voting into a single score, giving the technical bureaucrats more weight than the aesthetic team.
Broken promise alert.
But, wait. Despite all these last-minute revisions, the Fluor-Astaldi-MCM proposal -- the one favored by the local aesthetic team -- still led the competition by a half-point.
Both bidders hit the $803 million project cap. But at the last minute, Archer Western, which had submitted a 5-year work plan, shortened its completion time by a full year -- for which FDOT awarded them a half-point lead and the bid.
Game over.
No chance to question the improbability of Archer Western meeting such an abbreviated timeline. And no investigation of the bid winner's recent experience in the state of North Carolina, where its contract was terminated after delays of more than two years. In fact, the Tar Heel State called its timeline "illusory and unachievable." (See the attachment below.)
The bottom line is, the federal government is paying part of the tab to right a 50-year wrong. It was offering new hope for the historic neighborhood with an elevated “signature” bridge that would reconnect Overtown with the nearby arts district and heal the scar that was inflicted by FDOT in the first place. Yet, the local aesthetics review team figured in the final decision not at all.
After years of public meetings on the I-395 expressway, FDOT -- an agency I've defended and praised many times over on this page -- turned out to be the very model of unelected, bureaucratic arrogance, and maybe worse.
They rigged the bid, Florida. It smells bad and we should want to know why.
Said attorney Sarnoff, who will be involved in a legal challenge to the bid award, "2 plus 2 equals 4 in Miami, and it should equal 4 in Tallahassee, too."
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith.
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