NOTA: La pasada semana escribimos un artículo, preguntándole a los comisionados de Miami Dade porque de la demora en otorgar los contratos a las empresas que se someten a licitaciones y después de ganar pasan meses y hasta anio para que le sea otorgado el premio.
Después de este articulo que lo publicamos en español, hemos recibido muchas llamadas telefónicas de empleados del condado y empresarios pidiéndonos que publiquemos decidido artículo en inglés, es por eso que hoy complacemos sus peticiones. Muchas gracias.
MIAMI JANUARY 26, 2021, NHR.COM — With the new year, several people who have obtained contracts with Miami International Airport and with the county are very concerned about the delays in which the different selection committees that are in charge operate to analyze, study and vote to award a contract to the winners in the bids.
The problem is the committees that select the winner of a contract take a long time to send the commissioners the result of a certain tender, making the process an eternity.
Nelsonhortareporta.com investigated several contracts that have already been won by several companies and the process goes at a snail’s pace, but why is that? We asked, no one knew how to give us information in the county, we called by phone and they sent us a number to another phone number, nobody working, and if they do it is from home and everyone blames COVID-19.
One of the winning bids that the County did not know when it would go before the commission is for $50 million dollars and 5 years to carry out work at the Miami International Airport. It is a project that has been identified as the MCC9 and so you can see the slowness of the county this dates back to November 5, 2019, something unusual and absurd.
We wrote an article about this specific contract on August 24, 2020 and so far nothing has happened, the selection committee has not sent the project to the commissioners.
To go back a bit in history, 8 companies submitted their documents for the tender; the deadline was December 20, 2019, for the delivery of the bid documents.
On January 14, 2020, the 8 proposals were submitted to the county to begin the process on the MCC9 project.
Like all things county, it took the 5-member committee 4 months to hold its final meeting, evaluate and “rank” the companies. And as they say in the awards ceremonies:
And the winner is: Suffolk-NV2A JV scoring 462 points, according to documents obtained from the committee and by request from public records in compliance with article I, section 24 of the Florida Constitution chapter 119.
The list looked like this:
1st: Suffolk – NV2A JV 462 points
2nd: MCM 457 points
3rd: Lemartec 447 points
4th: Turner Construction 446 points
5th: Whiting Turner 441 points
6th: Thornton Construction 433 points
7th: CES Construction 424 points
8th: Núñez Construction 422 points
During the next few hours and according to public records, “The Selection Committee voted unanimously to immediately begin negotiations for the Suffolk-NV2A winner.
However, the company that came in second place MCM that obtained 5 points less did the story of the owner of the ball and the bat, “If I am losing in the game, I take the ball and the bat”, filing a protest against the winning company, and claiming that the MCC9 project should be given to them.
MCM is the same company that has mediated last year 2020, the FIGG company accused of being the real culprits of the collapse of the FIU bridge in 2018 where 6 people died. FIGG filed a lawsuit based on the fact that Munilla Construction Management (MCM) damaged the structure partially assembled by rolling the bridge spans into final position above the road.
Furthermore, according to FIGG, MCM did not correctly follow design instructions on a key connection in the unusual concrete truss structure. When cracks appeared in the structure in the days leading up to the collapse, according to FIGG, MCM did not communicate the seriousness to the engineering company, whose personnel were not present on the job site.
Our sources in the county told us that the delay in negotiating with the Suffolk-NV2A company is due to the Munilla family’s connections between some of the outgoing Miami Dade commissioners, including the former mayor and now Congressmen Carlos Giménez whose wife is related with the Munilla brothers.
Regarding this, the journalist from Actualidad 1040, Roberto Rodríguez Tejera, denounced him as “cronyism” and asked that the issue of this contract be resolved.
“If they do not deliver the contract to the real winners, so they can make bids, give it to the friends of the commissioners and it’s over,” said Rodríguez Tejera that day.
And we here at nelsonhortareporta.com agree with those statements by the journalist Rodríguez Tejera.
But according to our sources in the County, “presenting a protest is a pattern of veteran companies that do tenders with the county”, however, this does not mean that it is good, since that modality what it does in reality is delay the projects in the county.
We have been contacting the new president of the commission José Pepe Diaz and other commissioners to inquire about this and other contracts and because of the delay, since as Rodríguez Tejera says, “if a tender was carried out and it was won by a specific company, why is this company not awarded the contract?
These are the types of things that make the people of this County always question the work of our commissioners.
