By Robert Zullo
Richmond Times-Dispatch
RICHMOND, Va. -- Richmond is no longer using its correctional consultant, which has held an ever-expanding city contract since 2007, to develop the alternatives to incarceration programs that will be crucial to avoiding immediate overcrowding at the city’s new jail, expected to open early next year at a cost of about $134 million.
“I’m not aware of any services my department has used from them this calendar year,” said David Hicks, a former Richmond commonwealth’s attorney and a senior adviser to Mayor Dwight C. Jones who took over the Justice Services Department in April 2012 after the decision to shut down the city’s juvenile detention center and the resignation of former Director Charles Kehoe.
The city awarded a $3.6 million contract to The Ridley Group and Associates last year for “jail project management and correctional consultant services,” which included overseeing the construction of the jail and, among other tasks, helping the city develop the alternative programs, intended to divert mentally ill and nonviolent offenders.
Though Ridley and its subcontractors continue to be paid under the construction management portion of the contract, much of the money allocated for jail alternatives, about $450,000, remains unused.
“We still have the bulk of the funds allocated for alternatives to incarceration available,” Hicks said.
During negotiations with the city before the contract award last year, The Ridley Group said it would “utilize a team of part-time and full-time subject matter experts; as it relates to alternatives to incarceration and diversions, re-entry activities, detention programs and decreasing and maintaining a jail population of less than 1,032.”
But last fall, Hicks asked the City Council for permission to hire his own criminal justice planner to help get the programs off the ground, a position that will be funded through a federal grant.
“We decided that we really needed to focus on implementation and planning, and we needed to do that with an urgency,” Hicks said. “We felt we could better do that going in a different direction.”
In December, Hicks told the council that the city was nearly a year behind schedule and would have to redouble its efforts to get the programs ready in time. In an interview Wednesday, he would not discuss The Ridley Group’s job performance.
“We just decided to go in a different direction,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a good reason why we should have been behind, and that’s obviously a matter of concern for me.”
Hicks said Wednesday that he had been working closely with the office of Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Herring, the state Department of Corrections and the state Compensation Board, which oversees constitutional offices including local sheriffs, to attempt to ensure overcrowding at the jail isn’t a problem from the outset.
The new facility will have a capacity of 1,032 beds, not including an additional 114 special-purpose beds. The average daily population of the current jail can exceed 1,300 depending on the day.
“What we have discovered is it’s clearly not a simple answer. There are a lot of facets to it,” Hicks said.
For example, though inmates may be serving time now for a nonviolent offense, many may have past violent convictions, making it difficult to set the parameters for alternative programs. Hicks says he has a “high comfort level” that the city will “fashion the best solution possible” to avoid population problems.
“Time will tell. We’re doing our best to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said.
Herring said this week that his office “has not used or benefited from anything done by the Ridley Group,” adding that “… like a lot of folks, I hope alternatives are up and running when the jail opens.”
Ridley’s involvement with the city jail project dates to 2007, when it was hired under then-Mayor L. Douglas Wilder as the city began planning a replacement for Richmond’s aging, crowded facility.
Since then, the firm, which is based in Maryland, has received a series of contract increases and work expansions.
Though the original value of Ridley’s contract was about $200,000, by 2009 it was expanded to include consultation on improvements to the Richmond juvenile detention center, which had been placed on probation by the state Department of Juvenile Justice that year, as well as work with the Department of Justice Services to develop “community-based” jail alternative programs.
The contract was renewed again in 2010 for a total amount of about $217,000. Later that year, it was increased to more than $620,000.
In 2011, Chief Administrative Officer Bryon C. Marshall signed off an increase that made Ridley’s contract worth nearly $3.3 million, which prompted the mayor’s office to move to rescind the contract and put it out to bid to avoid any perception of impropriety, a spokeswoman for Jones has said.
The services for construction management and jail consulting were then combined into a single request for proposals that was issued in November 2011.
A representative from one local company who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging the firm’s chances of getting city business in the future said he and several potential prime contractors he talked to at a Nov. 29, 2011, pre-proposal meeting thought the RFP was unusual.
“The way this was being presented was not standard, and they were not very interested in going after the project,” the representative said of the combination of corrections consulting and construction management services. “The way that it was structured was out of the ordinary and it seemed odd to them.”
Another said the RFP seemed structured for a “limited number of truly qualified firms.”
Ridley assembled a team to put together a proposal for the RFP and won it handily, easily besting the only other competitor, BFE Strategies, a Richmond company headed by A. Hugo Bowers, who also runs Bowers Family Construction and was critical of the process used to design and build the new jail, a job awarded to the Tompkins-Ballard Joint Venture.
A city selection committee gave The Ridley Group high marks, noting that it had “extensive experience with designing and implementing alternatives to incarceration,” among many other factors, and determined that if BFE was the only company to respond, the city would have re-bid the proposal. According to emails on file with the city Procurement Department, Bowers and his staff raised questions about the RFP process for the jail consultant contract.
Curtis Bowers, BFE’s vice president of development, asked procurement staff for copies of the agreement for the design and construction of the jail as well as the city’s existing contract with The Ridley Group. A. Hugo Bowers also emailed, asking whether the bids would be opened in public. “Please remit a simple answer to the above question, i.e., ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ ” A. Hugo Bowers wrote.
Though Bowers lost out on the contract, a few months after the award, seven BFE employees had been added to the job by The Ridley Group.
The move squeezed out another Richmond firm, PEAC Consulting, which had been part of Ridley’s original team and helped the company land the job in the first place, PEAC President Barry Cromuel has argued.
PEAC filed suit last year against Ridley and the city and has called for a criminal investigation into the switch, arguing that the city orchestrated the change, subverting the procurement process to placate Bowers, who was threatening litigation. A. Hugo Bowers has said that claim is false.
The city has characterized Cromuel’s allegations as a dispute between a prime and subcontractor and has refused to comment on the lawsuit. A. Hugo Bowers has said his company got the work on its own merits. Ridley President and CEO Walter Ridley would not discuss Cromuel’s claims or his lawsuit.
“My lawyers are dealing with it. I can’t say anything about it,” Ridley said.
Cromuel, who also says he was offered about $700,000 worth of city work last year to keep quiet, has pointed to the close ties between Walter Ridley and Marshall, the city’s chief administrative officer.
Cromuel says he attended a 2010 birthday party for Marshall at the Mayflower Renaissance Hotel in Washington at Ridley’s invitation. Cheryl D. Wright, the city’s director of procurement, also was there, he said.
“They wanted to get it out of (Richmond),” Cromuel says. “Ridley made it clear that I should not tell anyone.”
Cromuel, then being recruited to join Ridley’s team for the city contract, says Ridley told him he was giving the party, which both Ridley and Marshall deny. Wright refused to say whether she attended the party in a phone interview.
Ridley said he didn’t “give a dime” for the party. “I was a guest like everyone else,” he said.
Marshall acknowledged that he and Ridley have known each other since 1982 and later worked together in Washington city government but insisted he was one of about 100 invited guests at the party, not the host.
“My wife paid for that party,” Marshall said, adding that she did not receive any money from Ridley for the event. Marshall noted that he delegated his authority to sign off on Ridley’s 2012 contract and other oversight of its provisions “because of questions like this.”
Ridley, a former warden and parole board chairman in Washington who was billing the city at a rate of $255 an hour for services under both the correctional consultant and construction management categories of his contract, according to invoices from last year, acknowledged that his firm is no longer working on the jail-alternative programs but said he had no indication the city was dissatisfied with his work.
“All we’re doing is the construction project side,” said Ridley, though he added that a subcontractor, Carter Goble Lee, a construction management company with corporate offices in Miami, is the “boots on the ground.”
Ridley said he has overseen the construction of four correctional facilities and says The Ridley Group is providing other services to get the Richmond Sheriff’s Office ready to open the jail, which he says will be in March 2014.
“It’s not just bricks and mortar,” he said, adding his team is helping the Sheriff’s Office review training and policies and procedures, order equipment and ensure deliverables such as furniture get into place.
The project is on time and on budget, Ridley said.
“The bottom line is things are going well. There are no problems and no glitches,” he said. “This is a lot of work. They’re going to have a wonderful project when this is finished, one that the city can really be proud of.”