Seattle to take disciplinary action

On Tuesday morning the port’s chief executive, Tay Yoshitani, announced disciplinary measures against a number of employees, including those people who deliberately rewrote a memo to mislead port commissioners, deleting the mention of a dramatic price increase and discussion of the factors that went into it.

Part of his public statement reads: “I am taking several disciplinary measures against staff members involved directly or indirectly in the situations identified by McKay. Before making my decisions, I weighed the severity of the finding as well as the degree to which a staff person was involved. Two staff members resigned when faced with the allegations; other high-ranking officials were given suspensions without pay and letters of reprimand.”

It is Seattle port’s procurement policy that when a winning bid on a project comes to more than 10% above the port engineer’s estimate, the port’s commission must be notified before the award of the contract so that measures to ameliorate the extra costs can be taken, possibly by retendering.

The original memo from the engineer on the awarding of the 2006 Third Runway Embankment contract to TTI did actually note the bid came in at 18.75% – well over the assessment and $32.8m more than the original $93m estimate for the job, something that may well have triggered further investigation into the contract.

However, the port staff memo that eventually reached the commission had been through four re-writes, the second draft “deleted both the specific notice that the bid exceeded the Engineer’s Estimate by 18.75% and the discussion of the contributing factors to the price increase”, said the report by Mike McKay.