Just before news broke that the Austin City Council was cancelling a homeless camp cleanup contract over the sketchy nature of one contractor, the Austin Texas Times published another expose on another recipient for that contract.
Turns out at least one city employee involved in the contract was all but handing the money to himself.
All the evidence indicates this is was almost certainly an inside job.
It certainly appears that at least one City of Austin employee colluded or communicated with friends and business associates to secure lucrative seven figure contracts.
Despite being grossly unqualified and totally inexperienced for the job.
It also seems like ICCS Academy is lying about a bunch of stuff on their bid submission.
Snip.
Believe it or not, the ICCS Academy bidding process raises even more red flags than P Squared Services.
There are two City of Austin employees listed as “authorized contacts” for Item 23.
Sandra Wirtanen John Wesley Smith This screenshot shows John Wesley Smith is the “Small Minority Business Resources” contact for this proposal.
Guess where John Wesley Smith used to work as the ‘Compliance Director’ before he started working for Austin city government?
ICCS Academy!
Can you imagine a bigger conflict of interest?
Maybe that’s why ICCS Academy yanked their website yesterday (link).
However, this snippet on DuckDuckGo still appears when you search for ‘John Wesley Smith ICCS Academy’
John Wesley Smith was the Compliance Director for ICCS Academy.
His bio states he also works as a “Small Business Counselor with the City of Austin”.
Snip.
QUESTION: Shouldn’t John Wesley Smith have immediately recused himself from the bidding and contract negotiation process for Item 23, due to his massive conflict of interest as the current / former Compliance Director for ICCS Academy?
Massive Conflict of Interest
Gee, I wonder how the other eight companies who submitted bid proposals for Item 23 feel about the former Compliance director of ICCS Academy overseeing the bidding process, and awarding a $7 million contract to his former colleagues?
John Wesley Smith was definitely the Compliance Director for ICCS Academy at one point in time.
Whether that was two weeks, two months or two years ago – it doesn’t matter.
John Wesley Smith should have removed himself from this project due to the awful optics and huge conflict of interest.
John Wesley Smith’s LinkedIn profile shows his current role with Austin city government is “Business Development Coordinator II”.
John Wesley Smith says he’s in charge of “negotiating contractual agreements for the City of Austin” and is “responsible for various minority/women procurements.”
Huh.
For the record, ICCS Academy is currently a registered vendor with the city of Austin.
However, all of their ‘certified commodities’ are in education, training and consulting.
So a training vendor gets picked to do homeless site cleanup despite no experience in the field because a (former?) employee works for the city and just happens to be able to throw business their way.
How convenient.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that the entire reimagining police lunacy was all about social justice warriors saying time and time again “take money from the police and give it to us.” There’s an entire industry of social justice grifters (both in homelessness and every other social justice cause) whose entire existence is dedicated to making life for average citizens worse while sucking as much money as possible from taxpayers. You can bet that this is far from the first time such self-dealing has occurred, and I bet forensic audits of both city contracts and the “nonprofit” entities that receive them would reveal numerous example of quid pro quo kickbacks.
Again, kudos to Teddy Brosevelt (whoever he may be) for peeling back the lid of Austin’s social justice warrior corruption problem.
Tags: Austin, Austin City Council, Budget, Crime, Democrats, homeless, ICCS Academy, John Wesley Smith, Sandra Wirtanen, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State
This is precisely why they wanted to shut down all the mental hospitals and haven’t done a damn thing to deal with the homeless situation. It’s a grift and a scam… Were they to fix the problem, they’d be out of jobs.
It might be better to just pay these creatures to do nothing, as opposed to allowing their constant rent-seeking. Or, alternatively, we might just refuse to countenance their grifts, and slaughter them wholesale when they pop their heads up.
Guess which I’d vote for?
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