D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser urges attendees at a community meeting on February 11, 2016 to support her plan for replacing a family homelesss shelter at D.C. General Hospital. Although she has defended the plan since, her administration is now seeking to hire an outside expert to study it. (Amanda Voisard)
As D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser forcefully defended her plan for a pricey new network of homeless shelters on Monday, some top aides to the mayor were quietly working to hire an expert to conduct a hasty analysis of those costs.
According to a solicitation obtained by The Washington Post, a new office within Bowser’s administration issued a request on Friday for “real estate advisory services.” Interested firms had just one business day to respond. The deadline was Monday, and the winning bidder would have less than a week to produce a report analyzing the 30-year, $660 million, seven-shelter plan.
For Bowser (D), who is facing tough questions about the cost of the plan, an independent analysis could help buttress her argument that the plan is in the best interest of District taxpayers. The stated objective of the study is to conduct a “value-for-money analysis . . . to assist the District in assessing the true public benefit,” including the status quo of doing nothing to replace the dilapidated family shelter at D.C. General Hospital.
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) questioned whether the compressed timeline for the study was designed to produce a thorough review of Bowser’s plan.
“The conversations I’ve had indicate that to do a good analysis will probably take four to six weeks,” Mendelson said. “And giving firms just one day to apply, that makes it very difficult to get many expressions of interest, unless, of course, they already know who they want to hire.”
“What I’d like to see,” Mendelson said, “is a ‘reasonableness assessment’ of this plan, because I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who find the costs unreasonably high.”
Bowser’s shelter plan calls for the city to lease five parcels and to build shelters on two others that the District owns. It would produce a total of about 280 units for homeless families so the city could close D.C. General by the end of 2018.
While most council members have committed to support Bowser’s plan in order to close D.C. General, many have also expressed deep reservations about the costs of the new sites.
An analysis prepared for the D.C. Council showed that the total assessed value of the five sites the city would lease is now about $14 million. But the city leases would make the properties worth about $145 million to landowners, potentially allowing them to sell the leases to investors for large profits.
[Homeless shelter plan could be profitable for Bowser’s backers]
On Monday, D.C. Council member Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) questioned Bowser about the plan during the mayor’s budget presentation. Silverman said she had serious concerns about the city having no option to purchase any of the five sites. She said that would mean the city may have to repeat the process after the leases expire in a couple of decades and find new shelters at additional costs.
Mendelson also noted that Bowser did not include funding for the leases in her 2017 budget proposal, saying that if no money needs to be spent in the coming budget year, the council shouldn’t feel pressured to act until questions about costs are fully answered.
[How did Bowser decide shelter sites?]
The council was expected to vote on Bowser’s shelter plan on April 19, but Mendelson said Monday that he wasn’t sure the council would be prepared to do so.
Michael Czin, a spokesman for Bowser, said the mayor remains confident in the shelter plan but hiring an outside expert seemed like a prudent step.
“We’ve had many questions from residents, the council and the press, and we’re exploring working with an outside firm to do an analysis,” he said. Czin said the administration had not yet chosen a winning bidder and wasn’t certain it would move forward. “We’re going to look at the proposed methodologies they come back with before deciding if we want to do such an analysis,” Czin said.
The solicitation for the work was issued outside the administration’s normal channels for such work. It was not published on the city’s Office of Contract and Procurement website.
Rather, it was circulated by Bowser’s deputy mayor for planning and economic development “on behalf of the Office of Public-Private Partnerships,” a new entity within the city administrator’s office.
Bowser has promoted the new office as a way to bring in large-scale private investment to help complete massive transportation, development, education and housing projects in the District.
An email to Seth Miller Gabriel, a former technology executive that Bowser tapped to lead the office, was not immediately answered Monday.