Richland 1 paid $2.6 million to mysterious landscaping company it was told to avoid
In 2011, Richland School District 1’s internal auditor warned officials about the district’s use of a landscaping company that had forfeited its corporate status due to tax delinquencies.
The auditor found that despite red flags “indicating possible solvency issues and potential fraud, waste and abuse,” Richland 1 had given the company nearly $2.3 million in no-bid business over a decade without a written contract or any administrative oversight.
Richland 1 officials responded to the internal auditor’s report by defending the district’s procurement practices and the company, whose work they said had been “excellent.”
More than 13 years later, Richland 1 continues to use Blooming & Grooming Landscaping Services, which hasn’t had a county business license in over a decade and owes the state thousands of dollars in unemployment taxes, an investigation by The State Media Co. found.
The school board extended its contract with the company in May, over the objections of two members, even as questions about its credentials persist and the internal auditor may again be probing its use by the district.
When asked about the district’s continued use of Blooming & Grooming, Richland 1 spokeswoman Karen York said the myriad issues raised in the internal auditor’s 2011 report had been addressed.
“There have been no recent concerns regarding this company, which is in good standing with the district,” she said.
Through November, Richland 1 had paid Blooming & Grooming $864,000 this year, and at least $2.6 million since 2013, according to a review of publicly available district expenditures and board meeting materials. Because The State’s review did not include parts of five years for which district spending data was not readily available, the total amount Richland 1 has paid the company is likely higher.
Richland 1 officials declined to explain why Blooming & Grooming had been paid so much this year — more than twice what it’s received in any other year The State has data — saying only that “landscape projects differ from year to year and may vary widely in nature and cost.”
For residents concerned about the district’s fiscal practices, Richland 1’s decades-long engagement with Blooming & Grooming is another example of the questionable behavior that has in recent years attracted the attention of state officials.
The state Department of Education placed the district on “fiscal watch” status in 2022 after an audit of its procurement card system identified “numerous significant deficiencies and material weaknesses” that facilitated unauthorized spending. The dubious designation followed the criminal indictment of Richland 1’s former procurement manager, who allegedly defrauded the district of more than $23,000, according to prosecutors. The case is pending.
This past August, the state department escalated Richland 1 to “fiscal caution,” an intermediate level of fiscal and budgetary concern, following a state inspector general’s probe of the funding, procurement and construction of a controversial early learning center. The investigation did not identify any criminal activity, but determined Richland 1’s failures and mismanagement resulted in a $31 million illegal procurement that ended up costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and causing the district reputational damage.
Julie Latham, a Richland 1 critic who scours district spending reports for questionable purchases, said the district’s relationship with Blooming & Grooming is a huge concern.
“It seems as though this is but one more example of the district’s lack of information, communication and transparency about spending,” said Latham, who helps run Friends of Richland County School District 1, a popular Facebook page with more than 5,000 members.
Latham said the landscaping company came to her attention several years ago after she and other taxpayer advocates noticed the district was spending large sums of money with it.
“The very first thing we did was look for any information about the company: Facebook pages, Instagram, Secretary of State, any of that,” she said. “We weren’t successful in finding anything.”
Landscaping company plagued by legal, tax issues
Blooming & Grooming Landscaping Services is an enigma.
The company, which has also used the names B&G Services and B&G Landscaping of South Carolina, has been run out of a private residence on Gervais Street since at least 2014, when it lost its commercial storage facility to foreclosure. It has no website and virtually no online presence.
The company launched a Facebook page under the name B&G Services in 2020, but has posted just twice in four years — once on the day the page was created to announce a special on palm trees and again a few months later to share a post by a female entertainment brand. The page has no likes and no followers.
Blooming & Grooming appears to have first entered the public record in 2001, when a disgruntled customer sued the landscaping company for allegedly providing “substandard” and “unsatisfactory” services. It was the first of at least seven lawsuits filed against the company and its then-owner, Lyvonne Able.
Able, an apparent adherent of the sovereign citizen movement that regards the U.S. government, its laws and most forms of taxation as illegitimate, declined a reporter’s request for comment on the company’s relationship with Richland 1.
Records show he incorporated Blooming & Grooming with the S.C. Secretary of State in 2005.
After Blooming & Grooming’s corporate status was revoked in 2009 for failure to pay taxes, Lyvonne Able, and later his wife, Mary Linda Able, operated the company as a sole proprietorship, a type of unincorporated business owned and operated by a single person, in which that individual is entitled to all profits, but also personally liable for all debts and losses.
While it’s not uncommon for independent landscapers to be sole proprietors, it’s unusual for a company bringing in as much revenue as Blooming & Grooming not to incorporate, said Frank Knapp, president and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce.
“It just wouldn’t make any sense if you’re making that kind of money,” he said. “Pay a couple bucks, get the legal protection.”
Records show that Lyvonne Able, whose history of tax delinquency dates back more than three decades, racked up thousands of dollars in state and federal tax liens in the years after he became personally liable for Blooming & Grooming’s tax payments.
He didn’t finish paying off all of his years-old tax debts to the S.C. Department of Revenue until earlier this year, and still owes more than $10,000 in unemployment taxes to the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce, records show. The IRS, which claimed in a 2016 court filing that Able owed the federal agency more than $100,000, would not tell The State whether he still owed the agency money, citing privacy laws.
As a business that operates in both Columbia and unincorporated Richland County, Blooming & Grooming is required to have both a city and a county business license, per county code.
The company secured a city license in 2006, the year after it was incorporated, but didn’t obtain a county license until 2012, officials said.
Blooming & Grooming let both its city and county licenses lapse in 2014, the year the company lost its building to foreclosure, and thereafter sought licensure under a new name and with a new owner.
From September 2014 until earlier this year, the company was licensed in Columbia under the name B&G Services, with Able’s wife listed as B&G’s owner, according to city business licensing records.
B&G, which reports having only one employee, changed its name to B&G Landscaping of SC in August, a city spokesman said. The company has not held a county business license under any name since 2013, Richland County’s director of business services said.
Mary Linda Able could not be reached for comment.
Internal audit found Richland 1 violated procurement code
It’s not clear exactly how Blooming & Grooming came to work in Richland 1 nearly a quarter-century ago or why the district has maintained a relationship with the company in spite of its internal auditor’s warnings.
Kelvin Washington, the district’s internal auditor, found in 2011 that Richland 1’s hiring of Blooming & Grooming resulted from the misapplication of a portion of its procurement code intended to increase opportunities for minority vendors.
Rather than using the policy to ensure minority vendors were given an equal opportunity to compete for district contracts, as had been intended, the district simply hired Blooming & Grooming without a competitive bidding process or written contract, Washington found.
Richland 1’s lack of any written agreement with Blooming & Grooming meant it had no means of enforcing requirements for insurance, indemnification, financial stability, dispute resolution or quality of services, the internal auditor found. And the district’s failure to monitor Blooming & Grooming’s performance resulted in payments of $2,297,698.25 between 2001 and 2011, without formal review and consideration of competitive bid.
“At minimum,” Washington wrote in a report summarizing his findings, “there should have been an annual review to validate good stewardship and fiscal responsibility, and to determine overall cost effectiveness of the engagement.”
Had there been such oversight, he wrote, the district would have known Blooming & Grooming was not a certified minority-owned business and had forfeited its corporate status years earlier due to tax issues.
Records show the company was “administratively dissolved” in 2009, by order of the S.C. Department of Revenue, for failure to pay taxes and submit an annual report. It also appears not to have had valid city or county business licenses in 2011, although the internal auditor’s report does not mention that.
Whether Richland 1 was unaware of the company’s tax problems or simply unconcerned about them, Blooming & Grooming’s corporate dissolution and lack of licensure did not keep the district from doing business with the company.
In the two years after Blooming & Grooming’s corporate status was revoked, Richland 1 paid the company more than $725,000 via six purchase orders, the internal auditor found. None of the purchase orders were submitted for board approval, in violation of policy, his report found.
The district even paid the company a nearly $70,000 advance on one of its projects at the contractor’s request, according to the internal audit report, which criticized the practice as extremely risky and a violation of procurement code.
“Advancing payments, especially without the benefit of a previous competitive bid and formal, written contract does not represent prudent business practice,” the report chided. “The contractor may not complete the job to specification (although none established) or may not complete the work at all.”
Richland 1 doles out large landscaping contracts
While Richland 1 appears to have modified some of the procurement practices identified in the internal auditor’s 2011 report, its board continues to give district administrators what amounts to a blank check for landscaping services, records show.
Rather than approving individual landscaping projects on an as-needed basis, the board has voted annually to extend what are known as indefinite delivery indefinite quantity, or IDIQ, contracts to several landscaping companies, including Blooming & Grooming.
The multi-year contracts are competitively bid at the outset, according to York, the district spokeswoman, but once awarded they give the district authority to dole out unlimited work to the approved landscapers without needing to return to the board for approval.
York said IDIQ contracts are beneficial because they allow the district to provide routine work to pre-qualified vendors without having to go through the bidding process for every single project and potentially impede day-to-day operations.
Since 2023, Richland 1 has paid more than $4 million to Blooming & Grooming and two other companies with IDIQ landscaping contracts, district records show.
Until this year, the board appears to have approved the contracts without discussion. That changed in May, when board members Robert Lominack and Barbara Weston pre-empted the board’s vote by asking district officials about the corporate status, insurance certification and licensure of the companies they were proposing to use.
Procurement director LaShonda Outing was unable to answer many of their questions, but did say that all of the landscaping companies had provided certificates of insurance. A memo she prepared in support of the IDIQ contracts asserted that “all firms are properly licensed and bonded contractors meeting all state and local requirements.”
The board ultimately voted 4-2 to extend the district’s contracts with Blooming & Grooming and three other landscaping companies, with Lominack and Weston in opposition.
The day after the vote, Mary Linda Able incorporated a company under the name B&G Landscaping of South Carolina, LLC, and was issued a city business license under the new name, records show. Starting in August, the name B&G Landscaping of SC, LLC replaced Blooming and Grooming on Richland 1 expenditure reports.
It’s unclear why, after being unincorporated for 15 years, the landscaping company suddenly filed new articles of incorporation. The timing of the move raises the question whether Richland 1 officials were forthcoming about Blooming & Grooming’s compliance with district procurement requirements ahead of the board vote.
York, the Richland 1 spokeswoman, said district code does not require landscaping contractors to be licensed, bonded or registered with the Secretary of State, but does mandate that they have a certificate of insurance.
Upon request, she provided two certificates of liability insurance for B&G Services, the name the company previously used on its city business license.
The general liability insurance policies, which have a $1 million per occurrence limit and a $2 million aggregate limit, run from June 2023 to June 2024 and from June 2024 to June 2025, respectively.
While Blooming & Grooming’s documentation may be sufficient to work in Richland 1, it should not be working in unincorporated Richland County without a county business license, Richland County director of business services Zach Cavanaugh said.
Landscapers that service multiple jurisdictions need a license everywhere they work, he explained.
“Most landscapers, contractors and pest control companies need to get a bunch of business licenses,” Cavanaugh said.
According to Richland 1 procurement records, Blooming & Grooming has worked at schools in unincorporated Richland County, including Lower Richland High School, where it performed nearly $300,000 worth of landscaping work earlier this year.
“If they serviced Lower Richland High School, they should have been licensed with us,” said Cavanaugh, whose records show that neither Blooming & Grooming nor any of its aliases have had a county business license since 2013.
Is Blooming & Grooming again under review?
A 2023 internal audit document obtained by The State indicates Richland 1’s in-house watchdog may again be at work on a review of Blooming & Grooming following an anonymous tip.
The tipster, the document said, relayed that a landscaping company that was told years earlier it would no longer be able to compete for work in the district due to “solvency concerns and other issues cited by Internal Audit” was nonetheless still working in Richland 1.
Blooming & Grooming is not identified by name in the 2023 document, but the document’s summary of the internal auditor’s past findings mirror his 2011 report on Blooming & Grooming.
“What actually happened to the vendor in subsequent years is inconclusive,” the 2023 internal audit document said. “But it was stated by the Administration in response to the audit, that no more work would be extended to the vendor.”
The document concludes by noting that a formal investigation had been opened and would proceed once other “priority projects” were completed.
The State was unable to reach Richland 1’s internal auditor to ask him about the status of any recent probe into Blooming & Grooming.
This story was originally published December 16, 2024 at 5:00 AM.