Like TURF
Follow TURFToll chief may get FIRED for ending special interest monopoly
No good deed goes unpunished...
Allen Clemson, the North Texas Tollway Authority's new executive director, faces dismisal over challenging the agency's penchant to hire only from a handful of "legacy consultants" who have monopolized the contracts at the authority. This is why the NTTA needs to be under a microscope and, if necessary, abolished! The taxpayer abuses are rampant!
NTTA chief could face dismissal over his efforts to limit reliance on legacy consultants
BY MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER
Dallas Morning News
03 June 2011
Allen Clemson is about to learn how difficult it can be to make the kind of institutional changes he's attempted to do in the 24 months since he became the fifth executive director in two years to lead the North Texas Tollway Authority.
The lesson could include his firing in two weeks, an event that would put NTTA on track to look for its sixth leader in four years at a time when concerns over its leadership in the Texas Legislature led to narrowly defeated attempts to subject the authority to review by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission.
Board members unhappy at the way he has led the agency, especially his push to reduce its dependence on a cadre of key consulting agencies that have filled scores of key roles at NTTA for decades, insisted Thursday that the board conduct a performance evaluation for Clemson at its next meeting on June 15.
An attempt to reach Clemson Thursday was unsuccessful. NTTA chairman Victor Vandergriff, who supports Clemson, confirmed Thursday that the agenda item will allow members unhappy with Clemson to seek his firing. Vandergriff said it's unclear whether there will be enough votes among the nine directors to remove Clemson, but conceded it was possible.
Vandergriff said Clemson's push to shake up the hold by the long-time consultants has brought consequences.
“He has moved to change them out,” Vandergriff said. “And for that he has caught some fire. As I've said before, if you look collectively at all that we do here at NTTA, at the end of the day it is about the money — and there is a lot of money involved here.”
But Vandergriff said any review of Clemson's tenure should include a review of his time as chairman.
After all, he has pushed the authority to review its relationships with contractors from the chairman's seat, a steady effort that began immediately upon his being selected to be chairman late last summer.
His goal has been to force NTTA to evaluate whether it would be better off hiring employees to fill some of the key roles now held by consultants, and then to decide if the current contractors are the best choice.
In late 2009, The Dallas Morning News reported that relying on the so-called legacy firms that have worked with NTTA since its founding as the Texas Turnpike Authority in 1953, had cost millions of dollars in unnecessary spending and played a role in NTTA's until-then poor record of using minority contractors.
Clemson vowed then to insist that all five legacy firms be subjected to rigorous competition as their contracts came up for renewal in 2010, and made a point of noting that he was new to the authority and would not be swayed by ancient relationships.
Last year, Clemson directed his staff to do just that, and some of the largest stars in NTTA's firmament — including HNTB Corp., its general engineering consultant since 1953 — were recommended for replacement.
But several members of the board, including the then-chairman, Paul Wageman, felt the staff was moving too fast to jettison firms that had become pillars of NTTA operations, especially at a time when it was just moving to add two new major toll roads to its portfolio, State Highway 161 in Dallas County and the Southwest Parkway in Tarrant.
Wageman and others became convinced then that Clemson and his staff were determined to change the roster of consultants for the sake of change.
Wageman stopped the process in its tracks just weeks before his tenure on the board ended. That alarmed state Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, who would later bring a bill in the 2011 Legislature to subject NTTA to state oversight. That bill died in conference in the final days of the session.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, too, became determined to force NTTA to re-evaluate its reliance on contractors, and along with Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, pressed NTTA to look for ways to spread some of its key roles like engineering and legal services to new firms, including minority- and women-owned firms.
When he took over as chairman, Vandergriff reversed course again for NTTA and has led the staff through a painstaking evaluation of the authority's business model — a process that is expected to lead to the replacement, once again, of some of the key consultants.
Already, much of the legal work that has been done by powerhouse firm, Locke Lord Bissell and Liddell, has been removed from the firm to be made available to a roster of smaller firms located throughout the NTTA's service area. That didn't come without a great deal of resistance on the board and from external voices, however.
An attempt to reduce further the role played by its outside general counsel was stopped, however, and led to the departure of the in-house lawyer who Clemson had hired the year before. Many board members felt that service by Frank Stevenson, who has worked on NTTA matters for his entire career, was too valuable to lose.
It's too soon to say whether reducing Locke Lord's influence will result in savings for the NTTA, or whether the quality of its legal representation will suffer.
But what has been evident is that Clemson has been confronted at every step with opposition. The consulting firms themselves and lobbying groups have worked overtime to discredit the notion that NTTA could save money by hiring more key staffers as employees rather than depending on the outside consultants to supply those workers.
Vandergriff said there are other “irritations” among Clemson's critics on the board, but that they are focused mostly on the issue of putting the contracts with the legacy consultants up for new bid.
“You've seen evidence of that in meetings. The concerns have centered a lot around our procurements and consultants, and the manner and method and timing of those procurements. Different people have different irritations, but that is the major core of it,” Vandergriff said. “There is also a sense that the NTTA that was, is maybe no longer the same entity.”
What he meant by the latter was that by seeking to evaluate NTTA's reliance on contractors, Clemson and Vandergriff have done more than simply ask the authority to examine its business model. The firms that have, in some cases, worked for NTTA since the 1950s has literally built the agency, writing its statutes, designing its roads, and have been responsible for much of the innovation that has made it one of the most-watched toll authorities in America. Many of its influential former leaders have urged NTTA to move slowly in abandoning what they see as its founding model.
Vandergriff said the push back from consultants themselves has been strong, though from he has seen it has not been through attempts to individually persuade board members to keep them.
“I don't know if its been some overt action, or some direct action to do that,” he said. “I can't say that I’ve seen that. But clearly their presence and their commentary in public settings and in the workshop settings has an influence on folks. HNTB is one of our major consultants — and they are a great company with a lot of outstanding people — and there are some on the board who hear what they say in the public settings and are concerned.”
The local leaders who helped form NTTA in 1997 did so with a clear idea that the authority should not become a bloated state transportation agency, as they felt TxDOT had become. Instead, they wanted to keep NTTA's staff small and let the work be done by the every best lawyers, engineers and planners available.
But Vandergriff said in an era when NTTA is building toll roads in all four of its counties, it must do a better job to spread the work around. In addition, it was long past time to re-evaluate the authority's dependence on the legacy contractors, given that the firms were supplying so many of the mid- and upper-level professionals who performed NTTA's most complicated tasks.
In 2009, The News showed that the habit of reliance upon the contractors had grown so pervasive that NTTA was paying more than $400,000 a year for some maintenance engineers who would have been paid perhaps $70,000 a year plus benefits by a state agency.
In other cases, the authority was paying hundreds of dollars to communications consultants to perform duties as routine as preparing a board members' packet of information in advance of each meeting.
Clemson vowed this would change, and some of it has.
But Vandergriff said the work is not yet done. “I feel like in dog years I've lived a 1,000 years during the four years I've been on the board. They've been pretty rigorous. Prior to 2007, it wasn't easy, but what the NTTA did was it built the (Dallas North Tollway) north, and parts of a couple other roads and a few tunnels and bridges. The pace and the expectations were different then.”
That changed in the Paul Wageman-era, as he put it, as NTTA has become the primary builder of new highways in North Texas.
“NTTA is at a crossroads, it has to evolve its operations to meet regions expectations and our own operational expectations. Its important for us to have our own soul. And if your key employees are working for other people, then that's where there loyalty is ultimately going to be.”
The board meeting on June 15 will be held at NTTA's headquarters in Plano. Vandergriff said the discussion of Clemson's performance will be held in open session.