Today I had a meeting with the compliance section of Public Transit to discuss grant awards that Phoenix gave the City of Surprise three to four years ago. When ever you dig something up from that far back you know something bad is going to happen. Well needless to say the bad thing happen! Whenever a grant reciepiant uses federal funds for a project they must follow all Federal Transit Administration regulations. This means that all contracts and project scopes must go through a competitive process. Well the bad news is that Surprise did not go through a competitive process for accomplishing the project objectives and on top of that we (Phoenix) has already reimburst them for all of the cost associated with the project.
So now I have the great pleasure of calling Surprise and letting them know that because they didnt follow the FTA process, they must refund approxiametily $79,000. This doesn't sound like a large sum of money, but if you read the paper you know that Surprise is currently millions of dollars in the whole right now. This is just another stick added to the hay stack. Also, I have to contact the Feds and inform them that Phoenix has disturbed funds that were not eligable for reimbursement. Its going to be a long week and its hump day already.
Good luck with this, with Phoenix being sort of the "big brother" to the smaller surrounding cities I would guess this happens quite a bit
ReplyDelete