Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass awarded the “rebuilding” contract for the recent fires to Hagerty Consulting for an unknown amount of money after a process that was conducted behind closed doors and without any public bids.
The contract appears to breaks a promise by Chief Recovery Officer Steve Soboroff, who told Breitbart News last month that there would be a competitive bidding process. According to the Los Angeles Times, the city considered three companies, not one of which is based in California, in a “closed door” process, agreeing on an undisclosed sum.
The Times reported:
“We have selected Hagerty, a world-class disaster recovery firm, to provide expertise and operational support to facilitate our comprehensive recovery effort,” Bass said during a news conference at which she provided updates on fire recovery and the city’s progress in the month since the Palisades fire wreaked widespread devastation on the coastal enclave and surrounding areas, destroying more than 6,800 structures. At least 12 people were killed.
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In the days since Bass toured the Palisades with Soboroff, her search for a recovery contractor has been mostly shrouded in secrecy. The mayor, along with four council members and other city officials, heard presentations from three firms at a closed door meeting last week.
Hagerty, AECOM and the disaster recovery and response firm IEM gave brief Zoom presentations during the meeting.
As Breitbart News reported, Hagerty is a “woke” firm owned by former Evanston, Illinois, mayor Steve Hagerty, who “appointed his city’s first chief equity officer, and signed a resolution to recognize that his city’s land was stolen from Native Americans by ‘white colonizers’.”
Hagerty has given maximum contributions exclusively to Democratic candidates for federal office, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars over the past decade.
Bass has emergency powers to appoint consultants without a public competitive process, but that is not what Soboroff said the city would do. He also said that the mandate of the consultant firm would be to act as an “owner’s rep” to oversee rebuilding activities. But no terms for the contract awarded to Hagerty appeared to have been made public.
Soboroff has been criticized for his $500,000 salary over three months, funded by unnamed private philanthropists.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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