The AshBritt Connection

Seven hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars gone missing after an in-house audit of Broward County Schools hasn't preempted the contractor who faces alleged ties to the missing cash--Pompano Beach-based disaster recovery contractor AshBritt--from discussing earthquake clean-up with Haiti President Rene Preval.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2/14/2010:

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Randal Perkins, head of Pompano Beach, Fla.-based AshBritt, has already met with President Rene Preval to tout his firm's skills. To press his case, Mr. Perkins, a big U.S. political donor with a stable of powerful lobbyists, has lined up a wealthy and influential Haitian businessman, Gilbert Bigio, as a partner.

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In his Jan. 28 meeting with Mr. Preval, which was attended by a McClatchy Newspapers reporter who was chronicling a day in the president's life, Mr. Perkins made a hard sell, boasting of AshBritt's $900-million U.S. government contract to clean up after Hurricane Katrina and promising his firm would create 20,000 local jobs.

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AshBritt, Mr. Perkins said, also has clinched a coveted contract to handle future disaster cleanup work for the U.S. government in California and several other states.

"First and foremost, we have the experience," Mr. Perkins said.

That experience has come with controversy.

After Katrina, some questioned whether AshBritt's political donations or lobbyists paved the way for its fat federal contracts. The lobbyists have included: Barbour Griffith & Rogers, a firm founded by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour; Mike Parker, a former Mississippi Republican congressman who also was a senior official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and Ron Book, a South Florida power broker.

Congressional hearings after Katrina aired objections that local contractors were passed over in favor of AshBritt. A 2006 congressional report examining federal contract waste and abuse noted AshBritt used multiple layers of subcontractors, each of whom got paid while passing on the actual work to others.

AshBritt denies overbilling Broward County Schools and has threatened to sue. (Questions raised, The Miami Herald, 2/1/2010). As summarized by the school district:

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It was discovered in the audit that some companies did not have contracts when the work was being done, and had to be written after the fact. Also, several different department heads were accepting invoices for the work being done. This led to double billing, which was discovered during the audit. Broward County also had the same problem of double billing. General Counsel is in the process to recover the over billed dollars. It will ultimately be the Superintendent and General Counsel's decision if the District will go after the money.

Read more here.

Sidebar. Lauren Book-Lim, daughter of aforementioned AshBritt lobbyist, Ron Book, is considering a run for the very same Broward County School Board pointing fingers at AshBritt, her father's client. (Sun Sentinel, 2/12/2010).

If her dad can serve as the Chair of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust and remain in the position while personally responsible for passage of the very laws resulting in the creation of a sex offender colony comprised of the homeless camped beneath the man's hometown Julia Tuttle Causeway, I imagine my concern over the potential seating of Daughter Book-Lim as an obvious conflict of interest when Father Book wheels and deals before the Board is just plain silly.