When the Port of Bellingham’s strategic project manager Alan Birdsall retires next year, who will train his replacement? Not Birdsall. Not other Port staff. According to Port documents, the job will fall to an outside consultant – for $329 per hour.
Port commissioners on December 16 authorized the Port’s legal counsel, CSD Attorneys at Law, to enter into a $219,456 contract with Anchor QEA. The Port does not contract directly with Anchor QEA for this work; CSD does, and the Port pays for it.
According to an authorizing memo written by CSD attorney Holly Stafford, the contract includes “additional funds” specifically “to facilitate the transfer of institutional knowledge from experienced Port staff to the new keeper(s) of this task.”
The arrangement raises a basic question of management competency: If the Port knows a key employee with specialized expertise is retiring, why isn’t that employee training their successor? Why pay an outside consultant to do it?
Commissioners never asked that question. The Anchor QEA contract was buried at line 16 in a 19-item consent agenda and approved without discussion. No commissioner pulled the item for debate or asked why the Port was paying a consultant to train staff rather than having a retiring 30-year employee do it.
Also approved without discussion was the reappointment of CSD Attorneys at Law as the Port’s general counsel at $360 per hour. It is unclear whether that rate applies to all CSD staff – partners, associates, and paralegals alike – or only to senior attorneys.
The Stafford memo had noted that the state auditor “has expressed a preference” for commissioner approval given the contract’s budget scope – suggesting prior auditor attention to the arrangement. Yet even with that flag, no commissioner sought clarification.
The contract’s origins help explain why the training arrangement exists in the first place. According to the Stafford memo, consultant Mark Larsen has provided environmental legal support services since the mid-1990s – first as an employee of Retec, then at Anchor QEA. The Port’s own staff may have come and gone, but Larsen has remained the constant.
Now that continuity has become its own justification. Stafford argues that Larsen possesses “very specialized and particular knowledge” that would be “extremely expensive to locate, retain, and educate” in a replacement. Therefore, Stafford claims, competitive bidding requirements don’t apply.
The logic is circular: After apparently sole-sourcing work to one consultant for 29 years, the Port now argues it cannot seek competitive bids because only that consultant has the necessary knowledge. The institutional expertise that should reside within the Port instead resides with a contractor – who charges premium rates to share it.
A review of Anchor QEA’s scope of work reveals that much of the activity is administrative program management: generating monthly progress reports, maintaining SharePoint document indexes, updating Excel cost models, and tracking documents for insurance submissions.
These tasks are billed at rates reaching $329 per hour for senior staff – approaching what the Port pays its lawyers.
The contract’s two largest components – Fortitude insurance tracking and cost modeling support – account for $134,121 of the $179,456 base contract. These are the tasks where costs increased specifically because Port staff need to be trained.
A review by The Northern Light of the Port’s contract database found no record of the “Environmental Programs – Legal Management Support Services” contract. The database contains 15 other Anchor QEA contracts totaling nearly $24 million – all for site-specific environmental work. But the legal management support work does not appear.
The contract is processed through CSD rather than the Port’s standard procurement system, which may explain the gap. The Stafford memo acknowledges that state law under RCW 53.19 requires competitive procedures for personal service contracts, but claims an exemption for legal services might apply. It concedes this interpretation is “untested” in court.
The Northern Light intends to file a public records request seeking documentation of where this contract and other legal-related contracts are recorded, and how they comply with public transparency requirements.
The Port’s contract database shows only 12 sole-source contracts in recent years. Yet the Anchor QEA legal support arrangement – which has apparently continued without competitive bidding for nearly three decades – is not among them.
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