Mayor Martin O'Malley said yesterday that his administration will try to determine how City Council President Sheila Dixon's office was allowed to pay $600,000 to her friend's company without obtaining a contract for most of the past six years.
"Certainly we'll go back and look at this again and see if there is something we might have done differently, might have done better to have been able to flag this as a problem," O'Malley said.
O'Malley said Dixon should have obtained proper approval for work that her office gave to her friend and former campaign chairman, and that his finance officials should have detected the problematic arrangement sooner.
The mayor also said Dixon is capable of taking the reins of City Hall if he moves to Annapolis by winning this year's race for governor. Asked whether he trusted Dixon to take over as mayor if he wins, O'Malley said, "I do."
But his political rivals say voters should interpret Dixon's actions as a reflection on O'Malley's lax oversight.
The Sun reported Sunday that Dixon's office has steered the council's computer services, worth $600,000 in six years, to Dale G. Clark, her friend and former campaign chairman. But since March 2001, Clark has earned the bulk of that pay without a contract from the city's Board of Estimates, which Dixon chairs and O'Malley controls.
All city contracts of more than $5,000 must obtain the five-member board's approval. After questions from The Sun about the arrangement last week, Dixon acknowledged Friday through a spokesman that her office had erred, and that she had disciplined two staff members responsible for the "major oversight."
Dixon would not comment yesterday. Chris Williams, her spokesman, said her silence on the contract stems, in part, from its possible link to a Board of Ethics investigation of the president.
Ethics officials, who are set to gather Thursday for their regularly scheduled meeting, are reviewing information about Dixon's participation in several official matters that involved city contracts given to a small company that employs her sister - actions that appear to violate the city ethics law.
Her sister's employer, Union Technologies, is a minority subcontractor for the city's main computer services contractor, which is now handling the council's computer work that Clark had been providing.
