Inspector general weighs in on appearance of favoritism in Jacksonville contracts

Jacksonville Chief Resilience Officer Anne Coglianese played a role in the award of three city contracts to Louisiana organizations that employed people she had a "personal or professional relationship" with from her time working for the city of New Orleans, but her involvement did not violate any ethics or procurement laws, an Office of Inspector General review found.

Inspector General Matthew Lascell's letter outlining his findings recommended the city tighten its standards for all city employees to avoid even the appearance of favorable treatment. Mayor Donna Deegan agreed and directed the city's Ethics Office and the procurement division to put the language suggested by Lascell in the materials they use for training and guidance to city employees.

The mayor continues to have confidence in Coglianese leading the city's strategy for dealing with the impact of climate change that Deegan has called "the issue of our time."

Former Mayor Lenny Curry hired Coglianese in July 2021 as the city's first resilience officer. The inspector general's review started after a July 18 anonymous complaint alleged she was steering city contracts toward companies that employed friends and former co-workers.

The inspector general's review identified three contracts as "areas of concern" in regards to Coglianese. The city awarded two of those contracts while Curry was mayor and awarded the third after Deegan took office. Lascell wrote the review found no evidence Coglianese "received any benefit due to the contracts being awarded" or that she committed any procurement or ethics violations.

"However, a reasonable person could assume she has shown preferential treatment to her former co-workers or possibly created a conflict of interest with these contract actions," Lascell wrote.

Mayor Deegan retains confidence in chief resilience officer

Deegan said at her July 1 inauguration ceremony that making Jacksonville more resilient in the face of climate change is "the issue of our time and essential to our success." The inspector general's letter does not affect Deegan's confidence in Coglianese to serve as the city's chief resilience officer, city spokesman Phillip Perry said.

He said that while the review did not find Coglianese violated any regulations, the city will "take every precaution moving forward to ensure that even the appearance of impropriety does not cloud this important work. Resilience efforts are critical to Jacksonville's economic success and our literal survival as a city."

The City Council authorized $20 million during Curry's term to take stock of how the city's infrastructure, such as bulkheads and roads, can handle sea level rise and other changes wrought by climate change. Deegan put another $10 million toward resiliency planning in the 2023-24 budget that the City Council approved last week.

Deegan has praised Coglianese's work on creating an in-depth citywide map of flood risks.

"It is absolutely astounding what they've been able to accomplish with that," Deegan told the Rotary Club of Jacksonville on Sept. 18. "It's gone street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood to show us not only the risks but the opportunities, and where we should be building and where we should not be building."

She said it will "set us apart from so many others in terms of our ability to plan and to plan smart development."

Inspector general examined contracts with Louisiana organizations

Before coming to Jacksonville, Coglianese was a coastal resilience manager from 2017 to 2021 in New Orleans city government. The Inspector general's review examined contracts awarded to organizations that do work in Lousiana.

Lascell wrote that Coglianese was "significantly involved" in the process that sought proposals for resilience planning services, resulting in the city awarding a contract in 2022 to The Water Institute of the Gulf, which is based in Louisiana.

Her involvement included serving on the city's five-member Professional Services Evaluation Committee that ranked The Water Institute's proposal as the best submission and approved entering into a contract with it. The contract had a not-to-exceed amount of almost $1.7 million, according to committee minutes.

"Our review found that Ms. Coglianese worked with this firm during her employment with the city of New Orleans and is personal friends with one of its lead researchers," Lascell wrote.

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In September 2022, she served on the evaluation panel that rated CSRS, which is a "primarily Louisiana-based company," as the top-rated firm seeking a contract to do resilience updates for the city's land development regulations, Lascell wrote. A former co-worker of Coglianese at the city of New Orleans "is also a principal representative of this company," Lascell wrote.

Lascell wrote that before that contract was formally signed, Coglianese organized a dinner with representatives of CSRS, The Water Institute and other contractor representatives "which happened to be the night before the kickoff meeting with other [city of Jacksonville] employees involved in this endeavor."

On April 11 of this year, she made a written request asking the city procurement division to award a single-source contract to The Water Institute for creating a flood model. A single source request would allow the award of a contract without the city advertising for competitive bids.

"The city of Jacksonville believes The Water Institute is the only organization capable of providing the level and quality of compound flood data being sought on the timeframe needed for the city's resilience program," Coglianese wrote in her memo.

City officials did not approve the request for a single-source contract. The city subsequently sought competitive proposals. While that contract still was going through the procurement process, an administrator in the Deegan administration received the anonymous complaint about Coglianese on July 18 and forwarded it to the Office of Inspector General.

On July 27 the city's Competitive Sealed Proposal Evaluation Committee voted in favor of awarding a $2.75 million contract for flood modeling to The Water Institute. It was the only organization that submitted a bid.

Coglianese appeared before the committee to answer questions and make the case for why the city would benefit from a flood model able to examine thousands of flood scenarios. She said it would help the city design infrastructure to better withstand flooding events in the long term while also sharpening real-time responses to flooding by giving detailed predictions of where rising water would go.

"No city in the country has done this yet," she said of the flood model's capability. "This is going to be groundbreaking use of data at a municipal level."

Perry said it was appropriate for Coglianese to appear before the committee because she is the city's expert on resiliency planning. He said if the Office of Inspector General had found any "immediate and verified harm" in its review, it would have asked the administration to take action before the investigation wrapped up.

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"It would be disruptive to city government if we were to halt critical city business in response to every unverified, anonymous complaint that is received," Perry said. "There is a difference between subjective appearance and hard facts."

After Lascell gave the Deegan administration his Aug. 16 letter summarizing the inspector general's findings, Coglianese sent an Aug. 31 memo to the Professional Services Evaluation Committee asking it to revise the first contract the city had awarded to The Water Institute for resilience planning services, according to city records.

Her memo, which came a week after The Water Institute requested the change, asked the committee to revise the fee schedule and raise the contract's not-to-exceed amount of $1,669,530 by an additional $30,000.

When the committee met Sept. 7, it approved a revised fee schedule but did not increase the not-to-exceed amount, meeting minutes show. Coglianese did not serve on the five-member committee at that meeting. A different Planning and Development Department employee filled that slot.

City adopts U.S. Justice Department's ethics standards

Perry said the city benefitted by having Coglianese review The Water Institute's request for the contract revision.

"With the OIG finding that no procurement or ethics regulations had been violated, it was important to have her expertise continue to be present during the assessment of highly specialized services," he said.

In Lascell's letter to the mayor's office, he recommended the city add the U.S. Department of Justice's "ethical principles" to the city's ethics regulations. The Department of Justice says employees should avoid any actions that create the appearance they are violating the law or ethical standards when viewed from the perspective of a "reasonable person" who knows all the relevant facts.

Perry said that Coglianese "has been counseled to avoid the appearance of impropriety." He said she will "continue to be involved as her subject matter expertise is needed, and procurement division code will be followed just as it was in awarding the three contracts" examined by the inspector general.

He said Coglianese never was the sole decision-maker for any of the three contracts because they all went through evaluation committees with procurement division oversight.

"The IG report found that there 'could' be the appearance of impropriety, not that there was," he said.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville investigates resiliency contracts with Louisiana groups