The 8.5 acre Arena lot continues to cause contention downtown as Peach Properties filed a timely protest last week, per the Rio Nuevo Procurement Code Section 28 to the Rio Nuevo Multi-Purpose Facilities District, over improprieties by Committee member, Alberto Moore, connected to the RFP that produced two $100+ million bidders, Peach Properties and Nor-Generations (aka Nor-Gen).
The protest arises out of the August 12th special meeting when Alberto Moore violated Rio Nuevo’s Rules and Procurement Code that maintain Committee members, under written oath, would “guard against any tendency that might slant evaluation in favor of a personal preference”.
The RFP was to guard against undue influence, and to this end, counsel instructed Committee members to have no communication or contact with anyone, including the media and/or other Committee members that could potentially influence their scoring.
The protest alleges that Moore violated all these rules.
After the proposer had presented, Moore spoke out strongly in favor of the Nor-Gen proposal and introduced parameters that were inconsistent with those of the RFP, items which he termed were “four key challenges”.
The net effect was to encourage other Committee members to score the proposals using criteria that was not part of the stated RFP and rather to slant their opinion.
The protest goes on to say, “That Mr. Moore was influenced by outside forces and/or considered factors not in the RFP is apparent in his grossly disproportionate scoring of the two proposals.” As was also documented in the Rio Nuevo meeting minutes of August 26, 2014 when the right to negotiate with Rio Nuevo was awarded to Nor-Gen.
Peach then goes on to request a remedy consistent with the procurement code, that is, to either a) disregard the votes of Mr. Moore all together which would have given Peach Properties the higher score; or b) cancel the award to Nor-Gen and re-issue the RFP, this time following their own rules and procurement code.
The Rio Nuevo Board will now have to discuss these options before proceeding. A copy of the Peach Properties protest was also sent to Nor-Gen.
To read the full 56-page protest presented by Peach Properties click here: RIO-NUEVO_Arena-Site-Peach-Protest