By: David Danelski / Staff Writer | Original Article at The Press Enterprise
Urban Logic Consultants, the company that is the subject of FBI and district attorney’s raids on Wednesday April 22, has provided management and planning services to Beaumont for more than 20 years, and this outsourcing of essential city work has been controversial from the beginning.
Urban Logic officials did not respond Wednesday to messages left on the company’s voice mail.
The views on Urban Logic depend on who you talk to.
“They were just fine with me,” said Mickey Valdivia, the former general manager of Beaumont-Cherry Valley Recreation and Park District who worked on several park projects with the city and thus worked with contract city employees provided by Urban Logic.
Urban Logic was often the subject of rumors about conflicts-of-interest and improprieties but Valdivia said he had never found those rumors to be true.
But city critic Libi Uremovic said in an email that the raids signify that a long era of corruption “is finally coming to an end.” The city has been saddled with $300 million in bond debt, among other financial problems, she said.
Urban Logic first worked for the city in 1993 as part of a consulting team that set up a bond program to finance public works needed to attract housing development to the city. Under city agreements, Urban Logic and other consultants were paid from the bond proceeds when the first bonds were sold, according to news reports of the time.
Some citizens then questioned the need for the city to go into debt for what was then described as a $655 million public-improvement financing plan, in which bonds would be issued incrementally.
By 1994, Urban Logic Consultants co-owner David Dillon was working as Beaumont’s city planner.
That year, Beaumont City Manager Dayle Keller was terminated, and she alleged in a subsequent lawsuit that it was tied to unspecified complaints from Dillon.
A year later, Urban Logic was awarded a $2 million contract to run Beaumont’s expanded 1.5 million gallon sewage treatment plant for the next five years — after the company had prepared engineering plans for the plant expansion.
By 1996, the consulting firm was providing Beaumont with several of its key administrators, including a public works director, Deepak Moorjani; an economic development director, Dillon; a planning director, Ernie Egger; as well as six sewage treatment plant operators.
City officials said at the time that using contractors instead of city employees in key administrative posts saved the city more than $250,000 a year in personnel costs.
But as Urban Logic stayed entrenched in Beaumont city government, its role repeatedly raised the suspicions of some Beaumont citizens, who claimed its inside track meant an unfair advantage to the company.
Critics of the city claimed that Urban Logic had received commissions for developments approved by the council, which the city denied, and that its contract with Beaumont posed a conflict of interest, because company personnel advised the council.
The conflict came to a head in 2010, when Urban Logic filed a libel lawsuit against a group called Beaumont Citizens for Responsible Growth. The suit demanded that the group’s website be shut down and it sought $3 million in damages for defamation.
The citizens alleged on their website, among other things, that the firm used “intimidation and threats” to protect its interests in Beaumont; that Urban Logic’s contract with the city had never been reviewed; and that it received a cut of all development projects, all of which the urban planning firm denied.
Urban Logic, in 2011, lost its case in Riverside County Superior Court, and again on appeal. The courts found the material posted on the citizens website did not constitute libel.
In 2013, the council approved a four-year contract with the firm to provide engineering services. The contract called for Urban Logic Consultants employees to work for the city on a per-hour basis.
The city was criticized for not seeking competitive bids.
But Joe Aklufi, city attorney at the time, said that since the proposal was for an updated contract and not a new one, a bid process was not required.
Staff Writer Craig Shultz contributed to this report.