HIGH FLYING AT DIA

Chicago-based aviation consultant that was awarded two lucrative contracts at Denver International Airport has a history of involvement in controversial consulting projects at the main airport in Atlanta.

Aviation Resource Partners Inc. (ARP), a minority-run firm that has contributed generously to Mayor Wellington Webb’s re-election campaign, has been given more than $400,000 worth of work by the City of Denver since December 1992, records show.

But last year ARP was accused of possible collusion with other bidders on a contract to study aviation cargo facilities at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport, according to a published report. And the company appeared to have a conflict of interest: Its registered agent was also assistant aviation commissioner for the City of Atlanta.

Less than two years before that, a no-bid contract to study air traffic at Hartsfield–awarded jointly to ARP and another consultant–was canceled abruptly after a newspaper reported that much of the work was unnecessary, and pointed out that the other consultant was one of Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson’s best friends.

“It was an absolute waste of money,” says one source in Atlanta familiar with the traffic-study contract.

ARP itself denies any wrongdoing. It blames one of the controversies on the machinations of a corrupt Atlanta airport official, the other on a hapless secretary.

The firm’s president is Corliss Stone-Littles, a Harvard Law School graduate who used to work as an administrator for United Airlines. John Drummond, another aviation consultant in Chicago, says Stone-Littles is “highly regarded in the aviation industry as a very talented and capable individual.” Another ARP principal is Howard Stanback, who served as Chicago’s commissioner of aviation in the 1980s.

In December 1992 Denver hired ARP as an “expert advisor” to help it select concessionaires for the $5 billion DIA, according to city records. Initially, the contract was for $85,000, but the company ended up charging the city $351,000.

Last fall Denver hired ARP again for more than $70,000 to help it write a series of contracts regarding maintenance of the airport’s automated baggage-handling system.

The term of that contract began shortly after ARP contributed $2,000 to Webb’s re-election campaign fund–but not before raising questions from Denver Auditor Bob Crider.

In November Crider asked the Webb administration why lawyers in the city attorney’s office couldn’t do the work themselves. Aviation Director Jim DeLong replied that the airlines who will use DIA had specifically requested that the city retain ARP’s help.

Pete Gingras, Denver’s airport property officer, says ARP performed essential work. The firm studied a proposal to centralize the distribution of food and other airport concession supplies and then spent months helping the city investigate the financial credentials of vendors hoping to set up shop at DIA.

“I can’t tell you that we would have been able to accomplish the work without them,” Gingras says.

But ARP’s services didn’t come cheap. Stanback, Stone-Littles and others in the firm bill themselves out at rates between $100 and $130 an hour.

ARP first raised eyebrows in Atlanta in 1991, after it was awarded half of a $150,000 contract to make traffic forecasts at Hartsfield.

The firm’s partner in the study was Arthur B. Cummings, a confidante of the mayor who, according to the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, had received more than $350,000 in no-bid consulting work from the city and related government agencies.

Much of the forecasting, the newspaper reported, already had been performed by a public agency called the Atlanta Regional Commission, and Cummings’s firm had charged the city $245 just for copies of existing ARC planning studies.

After the article appeared, Atlanta’s airport commissioner, Ira Jackson, ordered the study halted, says Shirley Harris, Hartsfield’s director of airport planning and development.

“For political reasons, the process was stopped,” Harris says. Still, both ARP and Cummings received full payment–$75,000 each–for their services.

ARP’s Stanback says his firm was the victim of corrupt scheming by Jackson.
Jackson, he says, was the one who first hired ARP and Cummings to study the airport. The firms were supposed to do three things: update aviation forecasts, inventory Hartsfield’s facilities and run some revenue projections to see if expanding the airport made sense.

Halfway through the project, Stanback says, Cummings and ARP asked for copies of Hartsfield’s concession leases–and quickly were summoned to Jackson’s office. “He said, `I don’t want you to do that,'” Stanback claims–and ordered the firms to quit the project altogether.

“We were stunned,” Stanback says. “We didn’t know why this was happening.”
But now Stanback thinks he knows. Jackson, it turns out, secretly was pocketing cash payments from Hartsfield concessionaires. In Jan-

uary he was convicted of taking bribes and he now faces the possibility of a lengthy stint in prison. (Convicted with Jackson on related charges of mail fraud was Dan Paradies, who was to have been the largest retail vendor at DIA. The City of Denver has since canceled Paradies’s contract.)

Stanback says he is sure Jackson cut short the ARP-Cummings consulting work because he feared that the firms, in asking for concession leases, would stumble across his crimes.

“I’m clear that’s why that project was stopped,” he says.
Arthur Cummings, who later became the mayor’s top government aide, agrees. He says the charge that the study was unnecessary was “a fabrication” by Jackson, whom he describes as a “guy getting ready to go to jail.”

“Everybody had egg on their face,” Cummings says, “and the easiest thing to do was kill the messenger.”
The charges of collusion leveled against ARP came last year from Max Walker, who succeeded Jackson as commissioner of the Atlanta airport. According to a report in the Journal & Constitution, an ARP subsidiary called ARP Inc. South and three competing consultants submitted one joint bid on a contract to study cargo operations at Hartsfield after all of them attended a pre-proposal conference on the matter.

Citing the “possible collusion” of the companies, Walker urged the city to throw out the proposal. The contract, worth between $350,000 and $1.4 million, ended up getting awarded anyway, and Walker resigned.

Stanback says Walker’s charges were unfair. Competing consultants often band together and bid jointly on projects, he says. “It made sense” for ARP to work with the others on this study, he says. “It happens all the time.”

But the newspaper also reported that Steven Baker, an assistant aviation commissioner for the city who helped steer the contract to ARP, had been the manager of ARP’s Atlanta office and was still ARP South’s registered agent.

Stanback admits the Baker connection “didn’t look good at all” but says the whole thing was an honest mistake. Baker had been working for the firm when ARP South was founded but later was hired away by the city. An ARP secretary forgot to remove Baker’s name from the company’s incorporation records, says Stanback, and it was still there when Walker’s charge of collusion became public.

“It was a clerical error,” Stanback says. “It wasn’t immoral. There was not intent to defraud.”
Baker told the Journal & Constitution that ARP South received no special treatment when it was awarded the cargo-study contract.

Airport contracts awarded to minority-run businesses have been a persistent source of controversy for the Webb administration in Denver over the last year.

Last February Webb asked Dan Paradies, the would-be airport concessionaire, to drop minority partner Raymond McClendon after it was revealed that McClendon had been Webb’s largest campaign donor.

This month the Rocky Mountain News reported that McClendon’s replacement, Denver businessman Willie D. Kellum, was on the verge of bankruptcy and owed the city more than $200,000 in economic development loans.

And the Denver Post recently estimated that the minority contracting program had added anywhere from $9 million to $384 million to the total cost of