Late yesterday afternoon, The Dallas Morning News broke the existence of a new city audit that found shoddy policies at three city departments around design and construction bids in 2014 and 2015. The timing is interesting, considering early voting on the $1.05 billion bond package began on Monday. (City Auditor Craig Kinton told The News that it’s purely coincidental.)
Last week, Alex Macon and I met with Majed Al-Ghafry, the assistant city manager in charge of the bond package, to discuss the bond for our voter’s guide. Before we could discuss the first pothole, Al-Ghafry sailed into procedure: How, in years past, the projects inside each bond proposition fell to the various departments inside City Hall. There was no central brain trust that served as chief overseer.
“The management of the entire bond program is going to be centralized into one entity, instead of having different departments do this” says Al-Ghafry, who was one of the new hires brought on by City Manager T.C. Broadnax. “Remember, the previous bond programs, the departments did them in addition to their daily routine, their daily work, which exasperates and pressures the department to do that work. With this model, what we’re trying to do is to build an internal team that manages or co-manages the bond.”
Al-Ghafry wants all the projects complete within five years. Which is why he prefaced our interview with all procedural talk—there are still millions of dollars in unissued bonds from the 2006 and 2012 elections, largely held up because of private funding problems or issues with the vendor or partner agency that couldn’t get the job done. In this package, for the projects tied to private dollars, the city will not issue the bonds until the private donors pay up. Al-Ghafry hopes that language in the procurement documents will prevent any deadline miscues.
“It starts with us, first of all, that we have the right procurement, writing the right specifications in the documents and having the expected controls established ahead of time so everyone understands that these are the rules, and these are the expectations that we have,” Al-Ghafry says.
City Hall is making its pitch without saying so, arguing that things will be different under the new administration. Time will tell whether voters agree. Head here to read our full guide to the bond package.
