Trouble in the garden
There was no competition - and virtually no public notice or public discussion - before the city gave a privately-funded $247,500 contract to a Baltimore architectural firm in 2006 to design a Cylburn Arboretum visitors center.
The Baltimore City Foundation in that case enabled the city's Department of Recreation and Parks to skirt competitive bidding.
Pauline Vollmer, a wealthy Ruxton horticulture enthusiast, decided in 2005 to make a $1 million gift to the city toward construction of a visitors center at the 207-acre city nature preserve near Northern Parkway. Her gift coincided with a Cylburn master plan that identified the visitors center as a priority.
The Recreation and Parks Department arranged for Vollmer's gift to be held in an account with the Baltimore City Foundation.
Vollmer attached just one condition to her gift: Matching funds must be raised. The city quickly agreed to provide $1 million in taxpayer funds.
By September 2006, the plans had expanded to include a 250-seat meeting hall, new offices for the Horticultural Society of Maryland and three other groups, and space for a gift shop and cafe. The 10,000-square-foot building, carved into a hillside, would include state-of-the-art environmental features, including composting toilets, geothermal heating and cooling, and a 5,000-square-foot, plant-covered "green" roof.
Instead of seeking competitive bids for the design work, the Department of Recreation and Parks steered the job to the Baltimore-based firm Grieves Worrall Wright & O'Hatnick, known as GWWO, which had worked on the arboretum master plan.
Project supervisor Gennady Schwartz, who headed the Recreation and Parks Department's capital projects division, said recently that because the money had been channeled through the Baltimore City Foundation, he believed that competitive bids were not required.
Yet the contract itself still had to be approved by the Board of Estimates. Schwartz and two others provided a different account of the architect's selection in a document they signed and submitted to the Board of Estimates. They said Vollmer had made the hiring of GWWO a condition of her gift. Then-Mayor O'Malley and then-City Council President Dixon were among the board members who unanimously approved the contract.
Interviewed recently, Vollmer told The Sun she required no such deal with GWWO or any other architect.
