I am your complainant, IG Miguel. Put Corcoran, Arza, and the whole Nov. 1 crew under oath
I am your complainant, IG Miguel. Put Corcoran, Arza, and the whole Nov. 1 crew under oath
Why is Gov. Ron DeSantis' IG working so hard to make a liar out of him and aid the ongoing, out-in-the-open government coverup of the DoE/Jefferson bid-rigging scandal?
Dear Florida Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel:
I would like to formally announce myself as a complainant for an OIG investigation. My name is Billy Townsend. My email is townsendsubstackpe1@gmail.com.
On behalf of the Florida taxpaying public, law-abiding citizens, and people who believe in public education and want to save it from public corruption, I find the bid-rigging scandal involving the Florida Department of Education and Trey Traviesa’s MGT Consulting a matter of urgent public interest. [For the public’s knowledge as a whole, Traviesa was also board chair for the IDEA Charter School company from 2019 until February 2021 and oversaw its establishment as a so-called “School of Hope” operator, similar to Academica/Somerset that failed Jefferson. Traviesa’s reach into the no-rules world of privatized education in Florida is extensive.]
I specifically want to submit a complaint about a Nov. 1 meeting held at the Florida Department of Education. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
But first …
Fenske: IG Miguel “is doing her due diligence on all of the above.” Really?
Why do I need to submit myself as a formal complainant? After all, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office said this about you, by name, IG Miguel, on Jan. 24:
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ chief inspector general is reviewing the handling of a bid-rigging probe at the Florida Department of Education, his office said Monday.
In a reversal from the office’s previous statement, DeSantis spokesperson Taryn Fenske confirmed Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel is reviewing how the Department of Education and its inspector general handled the bid for a multimillion-dollar contract.
“She is doing her due diligence on all of the above,” said Fenske, the governor’s communications director.
Apparently, Taryn Fenske was lying about you, IG Miguel, on behalf of Gov. DeSantis.
That’s the only conclusion I can draw from recent public email exchanges between Department of Education Inspector General Mike Blackburn, Florida legislator Allison Tant, and Jefferson County officials. Your office appears to have delegated the “all of the above” investigation back to Blackburn and the DoE. That’s troubling to me as a Florida citizen, IG Miguel, because Blackburn himself and his shoddy/constrained investigation into a tiny corner of DoE/Jefferson is part of my complaint to you. More in a moment.
“You have been identified as a potential complainant”
On Jan. 26, two days after the IG announcement, Rep. Allison Tant said this in an email to DoE IG Mike Blackburn. Note the part in bold:
Mr. Blackburn, it was a pleasure speaking with you yesterday regarding Jefferson County School issues as requested by Dawn Case.
As I assume this is an official inquiry into this matter, I suggest you start with Jefferson County Superintendent Triquet (eydie.tricquet@jeffersonschooldistrict.org) and Transition Principal Pons (jpons@somersetjefferson.org). The office phone number is 850-342-0100. Along with these officials, I would also suggest you speak with whomever was in the meetings with them when external operator contract funding was discussed.
Dawn Case is Gov. DeSantis’ deputy inspector general. She works for you, IG Miguel, which you probably know. I assume she was speaking for you and the governor.
Two days after the exchange with Tant, Blackburn sent this email to Jefferson County Superintendent Eydie Tricquet on Jan. 28. That’s four days after the governor committed you, IG Miguel to taking a “holistic approach” to the DoE/Jefferson scandal.
Good Morning Superintendent Tricquet,
Per the email below from Representative Tant, you have been identified as a potential complainant with information related to misconduct by someone at the Department of Education. The purpose of our meeting this morning is to provide you the opportunity to file your complaint and provide any evidence that you have to support you allegations. If you do not wish to file a complaint or feel you need to reschedule our meeting, please let me know as soon as you can.
And then Blackburn sent a second email to Tricquet and new Jefferson Schools principal Jackie Pons on Feb. 7.
Good Morning Superintendent Tricquet and Mr. Pons,
As you can see below, you each have been identified as a potential complainant with information related to misconduct by a Department of Education employee. As our initial scheduled meetings with you didn’t work out, I am reaching out again to provide you the opportunity to file your complaint and provide any evidence that you have to support your allegations. If you are interested in filing a complaint with the Office of Inspector General, please reply to this email with your availability Wednesday through Friday of this week.
I have some questions about this email sequence, IG Miguel:
Where exactly did Allison Tant identify Tricquet or Pons as “potential complainants?” She suggested you start with them, not depend on them to launch an investigation the governor publicly committed you to. I read Tricquet and Pons as witnesses — or perhaps victims — to the Nov. 1 meeting you already know happened because of extensive public reporting.
Does your “holistic approach” to the “all of the above” investigation of DoE/Jefferson bid-rigging require Tricquet or Pons to declare themselves formal complainants in order for you to move forward as you told the public you would in its interest?
Do Tricquet or Pons need to declare themselves formal complainants in order for you to “speak with whomever was in the meetings with them when external operator contract funding was discussed?”
Eydie Tricquet and Jackie Pons have been trying with all their might to save the existence of Jefferson County schools from state and charter school vampires who bled their Trump-voting county’s schools nearly dry.
Are you saying, IG Miguel, that you can’t put the vampires under oath unless Jefferson’s people show you all their fang marks first? Especially when all the vampires are so easy to identify by name and skulk around your building looking for new necks to bite. That seems bizarre.
Judging from the excellent reporting by Tallahassee-based NPR reporter Sarah Mueller, Tricquet found Blackburn’s tone and approach bizarre and intimidating, too:
“This seems to me to be they’re throwing it back into my lap to say ‘Oh, so what are you complaining about’ as opposed to asking questions to get more clarity on the situation,” Tricquet said about the request.
I, complainant
So I want to take pressure off Tricquet and Pons. If you email or call me, IG Miguel — or even Blackburn — (I’ll give you my cell phone), I will happily spell out my complaint on behalf of the public and tell you where to look — which, of course, you already know.
But to continue with this stupid, obtuse dance, I will also spell out my complaint here. I base my formal complainant status on what I read on Jan. 11, 2022, in the Tampa Bay Times about a bid-rigging scandal that appears to violate the spirit and perhaps the letter of state law involving the Florida Department of Education and MGT Consulting.
The same DoE Inspector General Mike Blackburn pressuring Tricquet and Pons failed to address this scandal although he had seen MGT’s name on a draft agreement used to craft a supposedly “competitive” Request for Quote DoE released a few days later. I’m clipping relevant details from that news story and Blackburn’s shoddy/badly constrained investigation at the bottom of this article.
But most crucial to this bid-rigging scandal is a meeting held at the Department of Education Building on Nov. 1, 2021. No one has investigated it. No one has fully documented who attended. No one has gotten an under oath account of who said what and made what representations with what authority.
But what happened at that meeting led Jefferson Superintendent Eydie Tricquet to say this, according to the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald story.
On Nov. 8, the day the request for quotes was issued, Tricquet told the School Board that state officials told her MGT had already been selected and had a contract.
“I do know on Nov. 29, MGT will be taking over,” Tricquet told board members. “I’ll know more when I’m meeting tomorrow with MGT.”
I, complainant, want you, IG Miguel, to name everyone at that meeting and put everyone who attended under oath. Start with Florida Charter School Alliance lobbyist Ralph Arza, who had no standing to attend that meeting — and yet attended.
I want you to put Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran — former Trey Traviesa business partner — under oath. Former DoE Vice Chancellor Melissa Ramsey testified to Blackburn that she understood Corcoran to control the entire bid process and have sole discretion to award the bid. Presumably Blackburn knows this because he wrote it in his report.
I want you to say why Blackburn considers it fine for DoE Chancellor Jacob Oliva to instruct a subordinate to craft a supposedly competitive RFQ built from a draft agreement with MGT. Presumably Blackburn knows this happened. He wrote it in his report.
In short, IG Miguel, I want you to do your job — or tell Taryn Fenske to come crawling back to the public and admit she, you, and the governor are lying and shamelessly, openly covering up this brutal public scandal in the stupidest and clumsiest possible way.
If all of this is perfectly legal, just because everybody got caught before the bid contract was signed, say that in public, too.
But don’t say nobody complained.
Supporting material for my complaint, all of which IGs Miguel and Blackburn already know and have access to
Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald account of the Nov. 1 meeting:
MGT had a leg up on the competition for the Jefferson County work: It had been in talks with the Department of Education for at least a week before the procurement was announced, and it was apparently tailor-made for MGT.
On Nov. 1, a week before the state opened the project for bids, the Department of Education hosted a meeting to discuss the transition plan with Jefferson County school superintendent Eydie Tricquet, Jefferson County’s current charter school operator and Traviesa.
Also included was prominent charter school lobbyist Ralph Arza, a longtime close ally of Rubio and Corcoran who resigned from the Legislature in 2006 after using racial slurs during a drunken tirade. Arza has four relatives, including his brother and sister-in-law, working in Jefferson County for the company currently operating the schools.
Arza told the Times/Herald that he was at the meeting on behalf of his job with the Florida Charter School Alliance, which advocates for charter schools, and did not stand to benefit financially if MGT won the award.
On Nov. 5, a Department of Education employee was told to draft the request for proposals. She was given a proposed agreement between MGT and the department and told to base the request for proposals on that document, according to a subsequent report by the department’s inspector general. The employee told the inspector general that Jacob Oliva, one of Corcoran’s top deputies and the head of K-12 education in Florida, gave her the document.
On Nov. 8, the day the request for quotes was issued, Tricquet told the School Board that state officials told her MGT had already been selected and had a contract.
“I do know on Nov. 29, MGT will be taking over,” Tricquet told board members. “I’ll know more when I’m meeting tomorrow with MGT.”
Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald analysis of how the MGT scandal broke “the spirit” of state procurement law laid out in Florida Statutes 287.057.
State law prohibits state agencies from awarding contracts when a company has an “unfair competitive advantage,” defined as having “access to information that is not available to the public and would assist the vendor in obtaining the contract.”
The fact that state officials were already discussing the work with MGT before it opened the bidding appears to violate the spirit of the competitive procurement process, said Ben Wilcox, co-founder of Integrity Florida, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
“The company could conceivably have gained inside knowledge of what to put in their bid that would give them an advantage over other companies,” Wilcox said. “I think it is really highly questionable.”
Wilcox also flagged the fact that bidding was open for only seven days.
“I’m not surprised there were no other bidders on the contract,” he said. “That would be a really short time frame to put together a bid.”
Supporting material from shoddy/constrained Blackburn investigation
On November 17, 2021, the OIG conducted a sworn, recorded interviewed with Wood as a witness in this matter. Wood stated that on November 5, 2021, Oliva instructed her to draft an RFQ for Transitional Services for Jefferson County Schools. Wood explained that Oliva gave her a deadline of November 8, 2021, to complete the RFQ and provided a document titled “Master Engagement Agreement By and Between Jefferson County Schools Succeed, LLC and The Florida Department of Education” (master agreement) to help develop the RFQ. The master agreement prescribed a proposed scope of engagement between MGT of America and the department. The OIG found no evidence that the parties ever formalized the proposed agreement. Wood explained that she did not have any experience writing RFQs and had only worked on Requests for Applications, so she was unsure how to compose the RFQ.
And …
Ramsey denied ever seeing the draft or final RFQ. Ramsey detailed that she did not have any duties in reviewing or creating the RFQ and explained that she was under the impression that Commissioner Corcoran would be the one reviewing and approving the proposals submitted in response to the RFQ.
Official cover up of the corruption scandal during the Dec. 13 Jefferson County School Board meeting by Suzanne Pridgeon, DoE’s deputy commissioner of Finance and Operations.
Meeting video link here. Excerpt from my account of the Dec. 13 meeting.
The board members recorded here on Dec. 13 don’t know yet about the massive Ron DeSantis/Richard Corcoran/Ralph Arza/Department of Education corruption scandal radiating off their tiny little school system.
It’s been kept from them, like it was kept from the rest of Florida until just before Christmas. This is an official cover-up, executed and recorded in real time. Remember that as you watch what’s deliberately kept from elected board members by an unelected public official whose salary we all pay.
The FDLE, the FBI, the Jefferson County Sheriff — anybody — should put Suzanne Pridgeon, DoE’s deputy commissioner of Finance and Operations, under oath. They should ask her what Richard Corcoran or Jacob Oliva or anyone ordered her to say or not say in an official government meeting to the elected Jefferson School Board about the MGT/Tuck/Ramsey corruption scandal scamming their kids and community and the entire state.
A comprehensive map of the entire scandal, which you already know anyway. But don’t say somebody didn’t complain or spoon-feed it to you.
