Fox 26’s Greg Groogan has dug further into the Comandante’s $11 million COVID “outreach” contract that she awarded to a longtime Democrat operative and found even more shady details.
That operative is Felicity Pereyra who previously worked on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign along with current County Commissioner Adrian Garcia’s mayoral bid.
Up until recently, her firm was just a one-woman operation that was headquartered at a residential apartment complex in Montrose.
Groogan filed FOIA requests to obtain the paperwork on the bidding process
It turns out that Pereyra’s firm “Elevate Strategies” did not receive the highest bid score. UT Health Science Center (UTHSC) had a high bid score.
In addition, UTHSC bid was $7.5 million while Elevate was just over $19 million, almost three times more.
So why didn’t UTHSC get the contract?
It appears that the Comandante had county officials disqualify UTHSC in order to award the contract to Pereyra.
“With Hidalgo's current chief-of-staff Alex Triantaphyllis as its ranking member, standard "financial fitness" requirements were eventually "waived" and the contract committee voted to recommend Elevate Strategies for an $11-million-dollar contract - a substantial $4 million dollar premium over the bid from UT Health...
Harris County Purchasing Agent Dewight Dopslauf tells FOX 26 the contract committee later contacted his office to disqualify UT-Health, claiming the winning bidder was behind schedule on an existing project with the County.”
Rice University’s Mark Jones points out the obvious, “this was an RFP (request for proposal) that was wired from the very start to go to Elevate Strategies to provide political money for Lina Hidalgo's supporters”.
Here’s the bid forms Bill King posted:
“Three of the five committee members highlighted above (Triantaphyllis, Dunn, and Nader) work directly in Hidalgo’s office. I was not able to find any public health experience or education background for any of them on their online profiles. The other two members (Sasu and Lofton) do not work directly for Hidalgo. Sasu has a master’s in public health and spent seven years with the CDC. Lofton works for the Harris County Public Health and has a master’s degree in public health from UT.
Bottom line: Were it not for the political appointees in Hidalgo’s office with no public health experience, UTHSC’s score would have been more than double that of Elevate Strategies.”