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Was dinner in the sunshine?

Potential contractors and two Expressway Authority members meet for a social event.

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published June 18, 2006

The setting: a private room at the Governor's Club in Tallahassee.

Engineers, lawyers and contractors dined with two members of the Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority.

The occasion?

According to a guest list: the authority's plans to build the first privately owned toll road in Florida.

On Friday, the authority will invite companies to bid on the project, which will connect Interstate 275 with Bruce B. Downs Boulevard, serving New Tampa commuters. Whoever wins the contract will stand to make millions in tolls, and will also be positioned as the leader in a new field within the state.

At least four companies are considering competing for the project. And already the jockeying for the lucrative deal has begun - not only in public meetings, but in behind-the-scenes maneuvering at a dinner and with phone calls.

The companies involved say they're only trying to share information and promote good relations with the authority.

Steve McGucken, chief operations officer for the engineering firm Kisinger Campo Associates, which co-hosted the April 11 dinner, called it an informal discussion about public-private toll roads in general.

"It was an opportunity for the people that were interested in doing the project to talk to the Expressway Authority and for the authority people to pick the brains of people going after it as well," McGucken said.

Participants would not say whether the project was discussed at the dinner.

"It was just a bunch of people sitting around, eating food, telling jokes, having fun," said authority board member Robert J. Clark Jr.

He added:

"It was a chance for a free lunch, so I took it."

Board chairman J. Thomas Gibbs, who also attended, couldn't be reached for comment.

"It was more social than it was business," said Jim Drapp, vice president of HNTB Corp., the authority's general engineering contractor, which co-hosted the event. "We were just talking about different things, some related to the authority, some not."

Did the meeting violate Florida's Government-in-the-Sunshine Law?

The law prohibits members of public boards from discussing board business in private.

"I never stopped to think about it," Clark said. "I'm beyond reproach."

McGucken said the hosts seated Clark and Gibbs at separate tables so they would not talk to each other in violation of the Sunshine Law.

Adria Harper, director of the First Amendment Foundation in Tallahassee, said that didn't necessarily protect board members from violating the law.

"Just sitting at different tables doesn't make it right, necessarily," Harper said.

The board members would have to refrain from discussing board business, even through a go-between, she said.

Ben Wilcox, executive director of Common Cause Florida, agreed.

"At the very least I don't think it looks good to the general public to have commissioners schmoozing with company officials that are going to try to win a contract from the authority," Wilcox said.

State ethics laws do not prohibit public officials from accepting gifts, including meals. However, the law does forbid officials from accepting gifts when they know, or should know, that the gift is intended to influence a future decision.

That wasn't the case with the dinner at the Governor's Club, McGucken said.

"It was a social event," he said.

In May, according to general counsel Steve Anderson, McGucken's firm got involved in another piece of the authority's business: the renewal of Anderson's contract.

The authority hired Anderson nine years ago after a competitive bid process. Since then, the board renewed his four-year contract once without going out to bid. Last fiscal year, Anderson's firm earned $615,677 from the authority.

A few weeks after the Governor's Club dinner, Anderson ruled that Kisinger Campo couldn't join a team bidding for the new toll road.

The firm has done substantial work as a subcontractor with the authority, and is too closely linked to the government agency, he said. The firm's history with the authority would create the appearance that it had an inside track on the work.

"We want (the project) to be absolutely above question," Anderson said in an interview.

Soon after, Anderson said he received a phone call from an acquaintance whom he would not name. The acquaintance told him that Bob Odom, Kisinger Campo's vice president, called board members and asked them not to renew Anderson's contract as general counsel.

"I called Bob Odom and confronted him with it, and he acknowledged that he was making the phone calls," Anderson said. "I told him I wouldn't tolerate anyone pressuring my board members."

Board member James T. Hargrett Jr. told the Times he took a call from Odom, who wanted to know his position on Anderson's contract.

Three other board members told the Times they didn't get a phone call from Odom.

Through a receptionist, Odom declined to speak to a reporter.

On May 22, the board voted to send Anderson's contract out to bid, instead of renewing it.

"To me, the connection is pretty obvious," Anderson said. "If it wasn't revenge, then it's, 'If you can't get the answer you want from Anderson, get another lawyer.' "

Last week, McGucken said his firm dropped out of the team planning to bid on the toll road. He said the project didn't make sense for the firm.

Even so, he said, the dinner wasn't a total waste.

"Sure, there might be something in it for us down the line," McGucken said. "We make a lot of relationships. That's how the world runs."

S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at (813) 661-2442 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 18, 2006, 07:18:46]