U of I contract questioned over potential conflict
A $4.6 million University of Illinois contract given to an architecture firm is on hold and under scrutiny after it emerged the company is partly owned by the husband of a school administrator whose job includes construction-project oversight.
The contract with BLDD Architects is part of the renovation of the Natural History Building on the Urbana-Champaign campus. Bruce Maxey owns 8.9 percent of BLDD. His wife, Jill Maxey, is the university’s associate director of planning and a former BLDD employee.
The state Procurement Policy Board plans to take another look at the contract at a meeting Tuesday. The board already voted once to recommend that it be voided, but that vote wasn’t binding.
“I did not think there was enough transparency so that I could look anybody in the eye and say, ‘There’s no way. that this woman was involved in that project,” Bill Black, a procurement board member and a former Republican state representative told the Chicago Tribune (http://trib.in/PRISJ7) in a story published Friday. “You’ve got to put it out there where reporters and other individuals can look at it and say, `Ah, that was a fair process.”’
Another board member, Ed Bedore, said the university appeared to be acting as if it is “above the law.”
State rules enacted in the wake of the administration of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich require the procurement board to review pending contracts that include potential conflicts of interest.
University officials say the school didn’t realize it needed to consult with the board under the relatively new rules but maintain they nonetheless acted within the law. Mike Bass, a senior associate vice president in the office of business and financial services, said the school will nonetheless put the contract on hold pending the board’s next steps.
“We will wait until we see the outcome of the meeting and any issues that may arise,” he said.
Jill Maxey, through a university spokesman, declined a request for comment from The Associated Press.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Pat Quinn called the contract issue a “serious matter.”
“This is a serious matter that should be carefully reviewed now and going forward,” Brooke Anderson, Quinn’s spokeswoman, said Thursday.
Though the university and BLDD disclosed Jill Maxey’s relationship with the firm in documents related to bid process, the board learned about the potential conflict in March. That’s more than a year after BLDD was chosen from 33 bidders and several months after university trustees approved an expansion of the deal.
The board voted 4-0 in April to recommend the contract be voided over potential conflicts. But Ben Bagby, who is the state’s top procurement officer for higher education, decided to disregard that nonbinding vote and allow the contract to go ahead.
During a May public hearing on the contract, Maxey’s boss acknowledged the university’s own steps designed to insure she wasn’t involved in contracts bid on by her husband’s firm were informal and hadn’t worked as well as they should have.
Maxey said at that hearing that she didn’t participate in the bid process, appointing a subordinate with his own less-direct ties to BLDD — he plays in a band with firm employees and has a brother-in-law who works there.
Both Maxey and her husband testified at the hearing that they didn’t discuss the contract while BLDD was bidding.
Randy West, a vice president at BLDD, called the possibility of voiding the contract “absolutely not” fair. West said the firm had done work for the university for 30 years.