Gov. Larry Hogan has directed his transportation chief to scrap a contract to launch a massive state highway project and restart the bidding process after an ethical concern arose in the initial effort.
The $68.5 million contract would have paid a consortium of companies to oversee Hogan’s $7.6 billion plan to relieve traffic congestion on major highways in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. But a firm with ties to Transportation Secretary Peter K. Rahn was among the winning bidders after he signed a waiver of the state’s traditional procurement process to award the contract.
Rahn was employed by the company leading the consortium, Kansas City-based HNTB Corp., as a senior executive immediately before he joined the Hogan administration.
Hogan’s letter to Rahn, publicly released Friday evening, said “a focus on speed cannot and should not ever come at the expense of the full and complete transparency that the taxpayers of Maryland expect and deserve. … I am not satisfied that our threshold for transparency has been met in this case.”
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Meredith Cohn over at the Baltimore Sun