A letter of intent for construction is the same thing as signing a contract for construction. The county is committing money to a project order where the county does NOT have the money in it's coffers to contract for and is a violation of state codes from everything we have seen and have shown on this site with the state codes. These people simply will not follow the laws and one has to ask why? Well as we continue to dig, we keep uncovering the why. Let's explore some of the county's own documents to reveal some issues.
October 27th 2011 RRMM Powerpoint from Chuck Thompson
Go through the above presentation that we copied from the Gloucester County government website. What we did was have several people with a great deal of experience with government contracting look over the above presentation and here is what we uncovered.
A fast and dirty analysis from one of our experts showed that option B, the rebuilding of Page Middle school, at it's original location at an approximate cost of about 22 million was unjustified and looked like it had the numbers highly cooked to look like the option was just slightly lower than building on the site where ground has already been broken on TC Walker Road.
Our second expert showed the following:
Go through the above presentation that we copied from the Gloucester County government website. What we did was have several people with a great deal of experience with government contracting look over the above presentation and here is what we uncovered.
A fast and dirty analysis from one of our experts showed that option B, the rebuilding of Page Middle school, at it's original location at an approximate cost of about 22 million was unjustified and looked like it had the numbers highly cooked to look like the option was just slightly lower than building on the site where ground has already been broken on TC Walker Road.
Our second expert showed the following:
"RRMM Architects was awarded a contract on April 21, 2010 for the purpose of providing possible solutions for the “Repurposing of Page Middle School into a School Administration and Operations Center”. (I am not familiar with this other than Gloucester was facing a possible school closure due to decreasing enrollment.)
On March 25, 2011 that contract was extended to June 30, 2012. On April 16, 2011 Page Middle School was damaged by a tornado. On June 6, 2011 a Purchase Order submitted by RRMM was approved by Gloucester County in the amount of $10,000.00 for “emergency work done to support investigative needs of schools to assess damage”. On June 6, 2011 another Purchase Order submitted by RRMM was approved by Gloucester County in the amount of $17,000.00 for “emergency work done to support investigative needs of schools to assess damage”.
To this point RRMM is involved legally. On June 15, 2011 a Request for Professional Services to “review the potential for reconstructing Page Middle School” was advertised. Everything RRMM did from this point forward was not legal in my view. The Oct. 27, 2011 documents you attached demonstrate they were performing work outside of providing "Emergency Services" and were paid for that work. Emergency Services work is allowed to be attached to an active Professional Services Agreement which was the April 2010 agreement.
Emergency Services is work like damage assessment and engineering services to safeguard and protect everything salvageable. On July 7, 2011 another Purchase Order submitted by RRMM was approved by Gloucester County in the amount of $13,545.00 for “schematic design/feasibility study-committee facilitation for Page Middle School options study”. This work included creating schematic design options of proposed facilities and locations, facilitating a Schools Superintendent appointed study-committee for Page reconstruction options and presenting those options to the School Board.
At a School Board meeting on July 12, 2011 the Gloucester Schools Superintendent, announced the receipt of eleven proposals in response to the June 15, 2011 Request for Professional Services. On August 9, 2011 Duane Harver, Principle for RRMM, publicly presented information to the Gloucester School Board pertaining the July 7, 2011 study committee facilitation purchase order. RRMM was awarded the Professional Services contract on January 10, 2012. By this time RRMM’s involvement in the reconstruction professional services process was extensive and again in my opinion, illegal.
As far as tampering with the numbers, I really can't say one way or the other. I do know from reviewing some of it numerous months ago, that a lot of the numbers do look deceiving. A look at how they correlate to the actual costs should be interesting."
From what we are seeing, it's deception in front of everyone's eyes. Time to open your eyes and look at what these people are really up to. Whatever it is, it does not look like it's within the best interest of the people at any level. How many levels of corruption are in this county? We keep peeling and it keeps coming our more and more.
