Company made $7K per meeting as part of Richland County dirt road program
The companies behind Richland County’s troubled dirt-road paving program made $7,000 each for a series of public meetings they conducted on the projects.
The 13 meetings were conducted in March and April 2015. In all, program managers at the Dennis Corp. and two consulting firms, P.J. Noble and J.B. Ladner, were paid $91,000 in fees, invoices reviewed by The State show.
Dennis had previously been contracted to hold seven public meetings to inform Richland County residents about the effort to pave hundreds of county maintained dirt roads. One meeting was scheduled for each county council district where paving would take place.
But after those seven were held — at a total cost of nearly $54,000 — 13 more meetings were scheduled: 12 in the Lower Richland area and one in the Irmo area. The contract guaranteed the program managers a $7,000 fee for each of the additional meetings, said Michael Niermeier, director of Richland County’s transportation department.
The State has requested a copy of Dennis’s contract with the county, which put the company in charge of paving 560 dirt roads from 2015 to 2017. Efforts to reach the Columbia-based Dennis Corporation and the two consulting firms for comment were not successful.
A preliminary audit of Richland County’s penny tax spending found the Dennis Corporation was paid a total of $648,292 for public relations and outreach services, which the audit says should not have been paid from the penny road tax. The audit does not accuse Dennis or consulting firms of breaking any laws.
Invoices show Dennis held three of the additional meetings between Feb. 22 and March 21, 2015, and 10 more between March 22 and April 18. It’s unclear who requested the meetings.
Councilman Bill Malinowski had one such meeting in District 1, which covers the area around Irmo in the northwestern part of the county, at Dutch Fork Middle School on March 11. But he said he was unaware how much money Dennis Corp. was paid for holding the additional meetings until contacted by The State.
“What did they do? Put some grapes out there, some food, and then it lasts an hour and a half,” Malinowski said.
Malinowski said an initial meeting was held in February 2015 at the Ballentine Community Center about four miles from Dutch Fork Middle School. He said he didn’t ask for an additional meeting.
“They just called and confirmed if this was a good date and time for me to be there,” he said, adding he doesn’t recall specifics about the meeting itself.
“I don’t know how it’s decided. I just figured it was a necessary evil to make people aware of the dirt road program and what would take place,” Malinowski said. “I can’t say if it’s worth ($7,000) or not, but it’s an outrageous amount to pay for one meeting.”
Another dozen meetings were held in District 10, covering the mostly rural Lower Richland community, then represented by Councilman Kelvin Washington. Some of them were scheduled to take place just two days and a few miles apart.
A year later, Washington was removed from the county council by then-Gov. Nikki Haley after the councilman was convicted of failure to file income tax returns. In 2018, Washington was sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to a DUI charge.
Washington could not be reached for comment for this story, but former District 10 councilwoman Bernice Scott said she attended at least two meetings for the paving program in Lower Richland, one of which she estimated had 65 people there.
“What people don’t understand about the unincorporated areas is that it can be 10 miles to the next house, and people might not have internet or computers,” Scott said. “You can’t just send a text. It might take three or four times as much to muster the same number of people together.
“If that’s what they paid, I’m OK with it, because they had people there,” she said. “If I had been on council, I would probably do the same thing.”
According to invoices reviewed by The State, Dennis and its partners charged a total of $53,902 for expenses from its first seven meetings, often with itemized expenses.
The invoices include receipts for the purchase of cups and napkins ($5.90), water and soft drinks ($27.08), and a collection of bananas, grapes and cookies ($84.29).
But charges for the events labeled “additional meetings” only list a flat fee for the three companies participating; $4,500 for Noble, $1,350 for Dennis and $1,150 for Ladner.
County records show most meetings were attended by around 20 to 30 people, Niermeier said.
The meetings were part of the community outreach around a paving program funded by Richland County’s penny sales tax. But to date, 62 roads have been paved, a total of just over 10 miles, out of a total of 223 miles scheduled for paving.
Niermeier said the meetings served a legitimate purpose in getting information about the program out to the general public, and while Richland County has a six-person public information office, the county seeks out professional firms to handle those communications.
“We don’t have the staff to produce some of this material. That’s why we contract out,” he said.
Dennis’s contract with the county ended in 2017, and the dirt road program was moved in-house before being transferred in 2018 to the Program Development Team, a consortium of three other companies that ran the rest of Richland County’s penny roads program. Since the county’s contract with the PDT ran out in November of last year, the program has moved back to the county transportation department.
Last year, program managers had identified 21 roads with previous design work done by Dennis that needed to be redesigned, after the work was found to be insufficient to move forward with construction.
Work on the county’s unpaved thoroughfares continues. Seven roads stretching a little more than a mile have been “substantially completed” at a cost of more than $1 million, Niermeier said at a county council retreat last week, and another group of 13 — spanning 2 miles and costing $3.1 million to date — is down to “the last couple of roads,” with completion expected later this year.
This story was originally published February 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
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