Fresno City Council Approves $250,000 Federal Transit Compliance Consultant

The Fresno City Council approved a quarter-million-dollar contract with a consultant to help the city’s transit department follow federal rules on projects funded by Washington.

On February 28, 2019, the council authorized an agreement with the LeFlore Group, LLC — a consulting firm run by Rudy LeFlore — for up to $250,000 to provide Federal Transit Administration oversight and compliance services for the city’s Department of Transportation, which operates FAX bus service.

The contract came after the department underwent a federal triennial review in 2018, which appears to have surfaced compliance concerns. According to the staff report, the consultant would help the transit department “properly implement suggested and required protocol, policies, and standard operating procedures as mandated by the FTA in response to the 2018 triennial review.”

The report notes the department was managing what it called an “unprecedented number of capital projects” at the time, including Bus Rapid Transit and a downtown bus livability project. Those projects — funded with federal dollars — came with complex federal requirements around construction procurement, project management, and quality assurance. The city risked losing federal funding if it failed to meet those requirements.

City staff recommended LeFlore specifically because of his “many years of experience in managing federal contract compliance” and his “long-standing relationship with the Department.” The pricing came from the California Multiple Award Schedule, a state contracting system.

The Breakdown

• The Fresno City Council approved a consultant contract worth up to $250,000 with the LeFlore Group, LLC.
• The consultant’s job: help the city’s transit department follow Federal Transit Administration rules on federally funded projects like Bus Rapid Transit.
• The city had just gone through a 2018 federal triennial review that appears to have identified compliance issues requiring the department to update its policies and procedures.
• The city risked losing federal transit funding if it didn’t meet FTA requirements on construction procurement, project management, and quality assurance.

What This Means for You

The city council you elect controls how Fresno spends public money — including whether to hire consultants to help city departments follow federal rules. This contract shows the transit department needed outside help to stay compliant with federal funding requirements after a 2018 review. If your bus service depends on federal dollars, the quality of that compliance work affects whether the city keeps its federal funding. When you vote for city council, you’re voting for the people who decide whether spending like this — a consultant to keep the city in line with Washington’s requirements — is the right use of a quarter-million dollars, or whether the city should have built that expertise in-house.

What to Watch

The staff report describes a “long-standing relationship” between this consultant and the transit department, and recommends him because of it. That’s worth paying attention to: does a long relationship mean the consultant knows the department’s needs well, or does it mean the department has been relying on outside help for federal compliance for years instead of building that capacity internally?

A quarter-million dollars is real money. If the city’s transit department has been through multiple federal reviews and still needs a consultant to explain the rules, what does that say about how the department has been managed? And if federal compliance is this complicated and this high-stakes — the city could lose funding if it gets it wrong — why wasn’t this expertise already on staff before the 2018 review surfaced problems?

Finally, the opportunity-cost question: $250,000 spent on a compliance consultant is $250,000 not spent on drivers, buses, or service hours. Was hiring outside help the only way to protect federal funding, or could the city have invested that money differently?