The High Cost of Low Bids

On the one hand, Adkins insisted he never even heard about the project until he received a fax from Shendell on Monday, August 2 -- two business days after the bids were unsealed and the day the letter of intent was due. "That's the first time I was advised of this particular job," Adkins testified. He said the first time he heard directly from Poole and Kent, the prime contractor, was roughly 3:30 p.m. that same day. Yet in other testimony at the county hearing in August, he said he had been aware of the county's request for bids on the grit-chamber project A but decided not to bid on it himself. And in still further testimony, he claimed to have first spoken with Shendell about the job on the bid day, Thursday, July 29, when Shendell asked him to go to Poole and Kent's offices to sign the letter of intent. Adkins also stated that before the bids were opened on that Thursday, he had no idea that a bid had been given in his name to the county by Harry Pepper & Associates.

Adkins had a noble rationale for why he refused to sign P&K's letter of intent. He said that he resented being "prostituted around" by Pro-Built, ostensibly to meet black participation requirements. Such moral concerns seemed to evaporate, though, when he signed a letter of intent for Pepper and Associates, which had also received his name from Pro-Built.

At the investigative hearing, Pro-Built's Shendell told a starkly different version of what happened. Shendell said that in mid-July he and Adkins had reached a "tentative arrangement" to work together on future projects. And by the July 29 bid date, Shendell insisted, they had reached a firm agreement on the exact price and terms of this particular project. Shendell also testified that on July 30 he faxed to Adkins a detailed explanation of the proposed work and fees that had been submitted to Poole and Kent, and to Harry Pepper & Associates, on behalf of Consolidated Techniques. And when he called Adkins later that same day, Shendell recalled, Adkins assured him he would go to Poole and Kent's offices before the end of the day to sign their letter of intent. He never did.

At the hearing, Shendell questioned Adkins's claim that he knew nothing about the bid to Poole and Kent until Monday, August 2. Adkins testified that he received the fax from Shendell detailing the bid terms and price to P&K, but he insisted it arrived not on July 30, as Shendell said, but on August 2 -- only hours before the deadline. He said he felt pressured by Poole and Kent to sign without having adequate time to review the document. But the Shendell fax, it turns out, raises serious questions about Adkins's credibility. The actual document in question -- the three-page outline of exact bid terms and price faxed to Adkins and submitted as evidence at the hearing -- reveals the time and date it was transmitted from Pro-Built's offices to Adkins: July 30, 1993, at 2:15 p.m. "That's my paperwork that was sent to Mr. Adkins so he would know what our arrangement was," Shendell testified.

On that same day, Friday, July 30, the flurry of phone calls between Adkins, Shendell, and various officials from Poole and Kent may have been matched only by the sudden peripatetics of executives from the seeming second-place finisher, Harry Pepper & Associates. According to testimony at the August investigative hearing by Cuy Broome, executive vice president of Harry Pepper & Associates, he and David Pepper, the company's president, flew to Miami the day after the bid opening A Friday, July 30. The reason, he said, was "to get copies of various documents" pertaining to the project bidding. Strange behavior, implied Shendell at the hearing, for a firm whose bid was $2.3 million higher than the low bidder's and who therefore stood little chance of winning the contract. On Monday morning, Pepper executive Broome testified, he and David Pepper again flew to Miami, this time to meet with Adkins. Why the travel itch? To convince Adkins to sign their letter of intent in hopes that their firm would be awarded the contract despite Poole and Kent's lower bid. It worked: Adkins signed -- and Pepper and Associates eventually won the contract.

Under county rules, all contract bidders may submit signed letters of intent after bids are opened, thereby keeping themselves in the running should a lower bidder be disqualified. But in practice, say veteran contractors, this is done only occasionally. Said Shendell at the August hearing: "I find it kind of interesting that Harry Pepper's representatives flew down here, called my office at 8:00 Monday morning, tracking down my minority subcontractor... when they [Pepper] were [second bidders]."