It’s the first public meeting since search warrants were released Friday, detailing allegations and what appears to be a months-long effort by Harris County executives to steer the multimillion-dollar contract to Elevate Strategies, a small Houston-based firm.
Text messages and emails collected by investigators show that weeks before it was made public, Hidalgo’s senior staff allowed Elevate Strategies founder Felicity Pereyra to review and revise the scope of the work.
As part of this investigation, no charges have been filed against anyone, and Hidalgo is standing by her staff.
RELATED: 13 Investigations: Search Order on Harris County Contract Details Alleged Benefits
Harris County Precinct 4 commissioner Jack Cagle, who was the only commissioner to vote against the Elevate contract last year, said he was shocked by what the affidavits revealed.
Cagle said the seniors being investigated should not be involved in the procurement process until after the case is over.
“Affidavits show that this was a case of bid-rigging the sentence,” Cagle said Monday. “That they initially worked to separate this special contract to that particular individual and because of that breach of trust, they should not be involved in other contracts unless they are released during the course of the law.”
As part of their investigation, officials found phones, laptops and desktops for Aaron Dunn, then a senior adviser on public safety and emergency management in the county, Wallis Nader, who is Hidalgo’s deputy policy director, and Alex Triantaphyllis, who now it’s Hidalgo’s. current chief of staff, however, was her deputy chief of staff last year.
Thirteen investigators on Monday asked several times to speak with Hidalgo and whether any of the three senior staff members mentioned in court documents had been reassigned or had left the county since the orders were posted. No one has, and we have not heard from Hidalgo since he reached out again this week.
Today, Hidalgo’s lawyer said: “The unsubstantiated allegations in the search warrant released on Friday take private text messages and emails out of context, false crucial facts, and paint a misleading picture of what really happened. For one, the command confuses different projects.Some of the communications you are talking about do not relate at all to the vaccine issuance RFP.This is what happens when snippets of an ongoing investigation are published piecemeal to the media, rather than confidential .
However, Hidalgo’s attorney’s statement does not clear our confusion about how the $ 11 million COVID-19 outreach contract was awarded to the firm that came in second place when a five-person committee evaluated it.
Each time the offer was finally open to the public, the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and two other groups also presented proposals to consider.
Then, Nader, and Triantaphyllis were on the five-person committee tasked with marking the proposals.
Investigators found that the UT Health Science Center in Houston received the highest score with 46.8% followed by Elevate Strategies with 40.4%, which raised concerns among some county commissioners.
A review quoted in the search warrant says that UT Health was forwarded because the county was not satisfied with its work on other projects.
In a text between Dunn, Nader, and Triantaphyllis on May 7, 2021, Dunn asked Triantaphyllis if he could hold the Outreach RFP meeting, which is happening now? Triantaphyllis replied, “No. Take it away. it, “” after a search command.
Before anyone could make an offer, investigators said text messages between top staff at the Hidalgo office from January 5, 2021 to January 7, 2021, “discussed Pereyra hiring to work with them, but it is not clear and accurate. as a capacity. “
As of January 14, 2021, an email from Pereyra to an employee states that her company was in direct contact with Hidalgo’s office, according to the search warrant.
The RFP was only made public more than a month later, on February 19, 2021.
Elevate Strategies won a nearly $ 11 million contract in June 2021.
Following initial concerns about the contract, Hidalgo’s team wrote in a September 2021 video on its ‘Truth Center’ website, “The county’s purchasing department has repeatedly demonstrated that the purchase process for the vaccine outreach contract was done according to the rules. “
The Texas Rangers, investigators with the Texas Department of Public Safety, said the information Pereyra reviewed was “substantially the same” as what was included in the final RFP. If that is the case, Dewight Dopslauf, the county’s chief of staff, told Rangers it would be “inappropriate and if true” the company should be “disqualified.”
Monday afternoon, Dopslauf told us he was unaware of the staff’s work with Elevate.
“The facts are that this company was selected by a committee that I had no idea who the companies were applying to,” Hidalgo said during a commission meeting on August 24, 2021.
But emails and text messages revealed in court documents suggest Hidalgo’s senior staff on January 7, 2021, “decided to send a proposed scope of work to Pereyra to Hidalgo for review.”
The Elevate contract was finally canceled in September 2021, three months after it was awarded, but not before the county paid them $ 1.4 million.
The county raised only $ 207,524 of the $ 1,425,237 it repaid to Elevate Strategies to recover the costs of “50 years of unlimited data plans for 50 tablets” and “digital advertising reservations.”
Elevate paid that amount back to the county last fall.
Cagle said all taxpayer funds paid to Elevate will be returned to the public with what came to light.
“If this contract was purchased in advance with the seller and then went through the ‘public process’, if the fixation was already in place, every penny would have to go back to the public,” Cagle said.
That request is not on Tuesday’s commissioner’s agenda, but Cagle said the question is whether it could be asked.
“I’m not sure yet, just exactly what all the questions I’ll be asking. I’m going to say that I feel justified that if Precinct 4 initially voted No against the contract because it did not smell right.”
For the latest investigations, follow Ted on Facebook Twitter.
Do you have a tip for Ted Oberg? To solve a problem? Contact us on our tip page, or send us a tip below. (On mobile? You can open our form by typing here.)
Copyright © 2022 KTRK-TV. All rights reserved.
Add Comment