Keep paper and electronic records of all contracts in a central location.
MDCC took issue with the investigation being predicated upon the anonymous four-page letter, which was widely circulated throughout the Delta and elsewhere in April. The legislators who requested the investigation by PEER, who aren’t named in the report, attached it to their complaint.
The document claims to contain partial transcripts of secretly taped conversations, filled with profanities, racial slurs against blacks and vicious criticism of opponents, between Sykes, who is Sunflower County’s chancery clerk; Sam Abraham, a member of the MDCC board and the Leflore County chancery clerk; and Magdalene Abraham, MDCC’s vice president of instruction and Sam Abraham’s sister. The document claims the trio conspired to oust former MDCC President Larry Bailey, who retired in May.
All three have emphatically denied making the statements and have said the document is a fabrication. Lee Abraham, a Greenwood attorney and brother of Sam and Magdalene, said in April that he turned the letter and other unspecified evidence over to the FBI.
“MDCC respectfully requests that this PEER Report and any additional reports be based on substantiated facts and not rumor or malicious innuendo,” MDCC’s written reply stated. “It is our position that no report from this state agency should be based upon the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation.”
An FBI spokeswoman said Friday she didn’t know whether the FBI was investigating or not and would check. Lee Abraham said Friday he didn’t know the status of the investigation because he separated himself from it following an April 28 shootout at his office, in which two alleged assassins were thwarted by agents from the state attorney general’s office.
MDCC requested that PEER not release the report to the public because it said doing so would make the unknown author of the letter successful in causing “irreparable and far-reaching damage to MDCC, its students and the general public.”
But PEER released the report anyway and said MDCC’s response was “truculent in its tone and misses the critical point of the report, which is that the college could use better practices to ensure a competitive, transparent process for selecting contractors.”
Sykes said Friday she hadn’t seen the final report yet.
State Sen. Gary Jackson, R-Weir, who chairs the PEER committee, could not be reached for comment Friday.
The PEER report said it “attempted without success” to interview Bailey.
PEER, which is made up of seven members each from the state House and Senate, has broad power to investigate use of public money.
It said community colleges aren’t bound by state bid laws, but it applied those laws to MDCC as an example of what the best practices should be when using taxpayer funds.
It said when community colleges don’t use open and competitive procurement practices, they open themselves up to allegations of favoritism like those contained in “A Document of Concern.”
Eric Clark, executive director of the state Community College Board, wrote a letter included in the PEER report saying he strongly agrees with its basic conclusions.
“Having worked in state government for more than 30 years, I absolutely believe in the importance of transparency and accountability. I believe that anyone who is responsible for spending the taxpayers’ money to provide services to the public should have clear, predictable and fair processes,” he wrote.
Clark said in a phone interview Friday that his intent wasn’t to comment on the situation at MDCC, right or wrong, but to say he generally supports transparency at all levels of government.
PEER cited MDCC for how it handled leases for branch campuses in Greenwood and Drew.
It said there was no element of competitiveness when the college leased property in downtown Drew in January 2006 for $800 per month. It now pays $2,100 per month for more space at the site.
In Greenwood, it said, the board didn’t document any analysis of five bids it received in September 2011 before renewing its rental contract with Mercantile Inc. for $8 per square foot. The company is owned by Lee Abraham.
The MDCC board had initially discussed parking concerns at the Park Avenue site, where it had been since 2008, and put parking space stipulations on bid proposals. But Lee Abraham met in a closed session with the board at its Aug. 1, 2011, meeting, and at the next meeting, the board voted to drop the parking requirements and re-advertise.
Sam Abraham either left the room during the discussion or wasn’t present at the meeting where action was taken concerning his brother.
One of the other bids, from the Greenwood-Leflore-Carroll Economic Development Foundation, was for less, $7.50 per square foot. PEER said that wasn’t necessarily evidence of a flawed process, but it said MDCC should have documented reasons why the cheapest facility might not be the best.
PEER said MDCC didn’t violate any ethics laws regarding the Abraham family and that the college received clearance from the state Ethics Commission before entering the lease.
Other criticism came from how MDCC handled leases for personal services because it did not seek multiple bids for several contracts over $50,000 and didn’t have a board policy spelling out how to handle such contracts.
For example, the college has a contract worth at least $270,000 from 2010 through 2013 with Total Control Training Institute to run its police academy but didn’t seek any other bids before hiring the company.
Other contracts of more than $50,000 with Clean Source Inc. for janitorial services and Neel-Schaffer for a hazard mitigation plan should have been bid out, PEER said.
Also, MDCC paid more than $280,000 in 2011 and 2012 to people who didn’t have contracts, it said.
