Schiff No Newcomer to City Contracts
Pulitzer journalist's story details indicted architect's "ballooning" city contract
Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez and high-profile architect Marc Schiff, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and mail fraud charges in one of the largest public corruption investigations in New Mexico history, were "cut from the same mold" and that meant special access to millions of dollars worth of city projects, according to an investigation by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Eileen Welsome.
Welsome's account of just how close Chavez and Schiff were, and how lucrative that relationship was for Schiff, was released Friday by the Center for Civic Policy. The report centers on Schiff's work with the Albuquerque Balloon Park and Museum -- a contract that inflated Schiff's original contract of about half a million dollars to about $6.7 million over the last 12 years.
The New Mexico Independent's story today also showed Schiff's ties to another over-budget city project, the Albuquerque Fire Department's cadet academy under construction on the West Side. The city has said Schiff was the original architect, but he was taken off the project in 2006 and has nothing to do with the increased cost of the fire academy, which was $2.3 million in 2006, and will cost $9.1 million when it is completed later this year.
Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez has not commented on Welsome's story, saying through a spokeswoman that he wasn't going to start responding to "blog posts."
Matt Brix, policy director for the Center for Civic Policy disagrees with Chavez's assessment of Welsome's story.
"Increasingly, the public gets its news and information from online sources," Brix said. "Ms. Welsome is a respected journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner. She was given complete editorial independence in determining the course of this story. The facts in this story speak for themselves."
"I wrote this story the way I would have for any newspaper or magazine,' Welsome said from her home in Denver, Colo. on Friday. "The (Center for Civic Policy) had no editorial input at all. Had I investigated this and found it to be meritless, there would have been no story. But what I found was concerning. It raises many questions."
Last March, the U.S. Attorney's Office unveiled a 26-count indictment that detailed a fraud and kickback scheme in which $4.2 million of taxpayer money was skimmed off and paid to former and current politicians and other state officials for construction of the $83 million Metro Court complex in Downtown Albuquerque.Schiff was one of at least eight people involved in the scheme, according to court documents. He was the architect for the courthouse.
Schiff has pleaded guilty to two felony counts and agreed to cooperate with federal law enforcement agents in exchange for a reduced sentence. A trial in U.S. District Court is pending.
Welsome said the balloon park and museum were "two massive projects that funneled hundreds of thousands of city dollars to Schiff and his firm over more than a decade -- despite repeated concerns about his work and even a project manager's recommendation that Schiff be fired."
She quotes Balloon Fiesta Park insider Steve Wentworth saying "Schiff bypassed groups and committees and went directly to the Mayor's Office." Wentworth has served on various balloon park advisory committees since the mid 1990s.
Welsome said neither Chavez nor his Chief of Staff, Bruce Perlman, have responded to e-mails or requests for interviews about Schiff and his city contracts. But documents shedding light on Schiff's dealings with the city were obtained through half a dozen requests with various city departments filed under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act.
Welsome has received more than two dozen national awards for her journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories that she wrote for The Albuquerque Tribune in 1994 about 18 hospital patients who were injected with plutonium without their knowledge by the doctors and scientists working on the Manhattan Project.
Be the first to comment