FAIRHOPE— The City Council voted 3-2 last week to approve a contract with Pittman Tractor Co. for disaster debris removal. The contract was awarded to the company of Sen. Trip Pittman, R-Montrose, despite the controversy surrounding a previous Pittman disaster cleanup contract and several citizens’ pleas to reconsider.

On June 25, Fairhope Council President Lonnie Mixon, and council members Mike Ford and Debbie Quinn voted to approve the contract, and council members Dan Stankoski and Rick Kingrea voted against it.

Ford said he thought the city had gone overboard trying to make sure everything was okay with the contract award.

“I’ve got no problem with who gets the contract,” Ford said. “The law says to do it this way. And I’m going to stick with the law.”

Ken Eslava, the city’s projects and maintenance manager, said he used data from Hurricane Ivan to calculate debris estimates used in selecting the low bidder. By those estimations, Pittman Tractor was the lowest bidder.

There were 48 individual unit prices, not including equipment hourly rates, listed on the bid tabulation. Of those, nine individual units were chosen and used to calculate the low bid, Kingrea pointed out.

“This is a unit contract, and there are other ways to figure it,” Kingrea told Eslava, who had just explained the bid process. “There were like 50 different items that could all be fit in there. And you used basically nine different items. I don’t have a problem with that, but there were still 50 items that were listed. So, depending on which of those 50 items you used, you could have gotten 13 different low bidders perhaps.”

State law says that the low bidder must be selected, City Attorney Marion “Tut” Wynne told the council.

Mixon read from an Alabama statute, which says that “the contract shall be awarded to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder.”

But Kingrea said he contacted an attorney at the Alabama League of Municipalities, who disagreed with Wynne’s opinion that the lowest bidder had to be awarded the contract.

“I really have problems with awarding the contract on a low-bid basis when (the city) says in our document that we sent to (the bidders) we aren’t going to do it on a low-bid basis, but on a most-qualified basis,” Kingrea said.

City Clerk Lisa Hanks told the council she had contacted the Alabama Ethics Commission to ensure that Pittman could be awarded the contract, and Pittman has said that he received clearance from the agency before bidding on it.

‘Cloud of suspicion’

One of the citizens at the June 25 council meeting who objected to the award of the contract to Pittman Tractor was Fairhope resident and business owner Bobby Green.

“I understand it is perfectly legal to award the bid to the state senator; however, it’s not in the best interest of the city of Fairhope,” Green said. “There is a cloud of suspicion hanging over all of us.”

The controversy stems from the award of a $625,575 contract to Pittman’s company after the BP oil spill in 2010, which has purportedly led to an ongoing federal investigation, according to Pittman and others who have received subpoenas and provided documents and testimony during the past year.

Pittman has denied any wrongdoing in the award of the 2010 contract to set up oil booms along Fairhope’s coastline and no charges have been filed in the case.

A complaint against Pittman over the 2010 contract was filed by Fairhope resident Paul Ripp with the State Ethics Commission. That agency closed the complaint in 2011 without action after Ripp filed a complaint against the agency itself, which responded by closing the file on the initial complaint. But the ethics agency never made any statement about the merits of the complaint when it closed its file on the case.

When Pittman Tractor was awarded the specific oil-boom contract in the first week of June 2010, Pittman’s company also held the same general two-year disaster debris removal contract that was awarded to Pittman Tractor this week. In June 2009, the council extended his company’s existing two-year contract for another year.

Contract stays with companies of public officials in business together

After that contract expired, it was awarded on June 14, 2010, to the company of now-County Commissioner Bob James, a long-time business associate of Pittman’s.

According to an article in The Fairhope Courier in August 2010, James Bros. Excavating won the low bid that year by $350 in a bid that was over $1 million.

Pittman Tractor Co. and James Bros. Excavating are located on property next to each other at 9652 Milton Jones Road in Daphne. The two public officials also work together at that address in a “dirt extraction” business called Eastern Shore Materials Inc., according to state records.

That company was established in 1998 and both Pittman and James have held officer positions in the company since its creation. Pittman is the current president and James is its registered agent.

Since 2007, the companies of either Pittman or James have held Fairhope’s disaster debris contract. The current contract that was awarded to the company of Sen. Pittman will expire in June 2014.