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Earlier this summer, Oakland was on the verge of awarding a major contract worth up to $45 million to guard City Hall and other public properties. The Department of Public Works, which evaluated a group of applicants, wanted the award to go to a national company called Allied Universal Security Services.
But the City Council needed to approve this decision. At a Public Works committee meeting, a group of councilmembers decided the bid shouldn’t go to Allied. They instead wanted to give it to a smaller, local firm called Marina Security Services.
After some heated public debate and an attempt to have the council choose between the two firms, the proposal vanished from the city’s legislative calendar. The councilmembers departed at the end of July for their annual summer recess, and a city spokesperson promised that a new proposal would come forward in late September.
There’s a lot of money riding on this contract, and with it, a lot of political pressure on Interim Public Works Director Josh Rowan — the man overseeing this procurement. Some of Oakland’s elected leaders have made it clear they want this bid to go to Marina. But Rowan isn’t backing down from his original position.
“There was a clear winner — it was Allied,” Rowan told The Oaklandside in an interview. “I believe it either needs to be awarded to Allied, or, if the council wants something different, they can bring their own legislation.”
Rowan could barely conceal his frustration during the July 8 Public Works meeting when several members interrogated his staff and rejected his recommendation. Behind the scenes, he vented to his boss, City Administrator Jestin Johnson.
In a July 16 email obtained by The Oaklandside, Rowan wrote that the council’s Public Works committee had made a “mess” of things. He felt he was being “unfairly flogged” by councilmembers, representatives for Marina Security Services, and the public “for simply trying to bring order to chaos and doing my job.” Rowan said in the email that he wanted to throw out the entire procurement and restart the process.
In his email, Rowan also complained that the City Attorney was “directing” the contracting process.
Speaking to The Oaklandside, Rowan explained that the City Attorney had recommended giving the council two resolutions — one awarding the bid to Allied, the other awarding it to Marina — and letting the elected officials choose. Rowan ultimately refused to endorse this idea.
“I just don’t want to set a precedent that if you’re a close number two,” — meaning a company whose bid didn’t rank first in a competitive contracting process— “that you can activate some political process and undo what we as staff have put together,” Rowan said.
Rowan and contractors see issues with how Oakland handles contracts
Rowan said that he was tasked with handling the security services contract in December 2024, coming in at what he described as “the 11th hour.” In reviewing records from the procurement process, Rowan said he was alarmed to see “a lot of conversations” between the companies seeking the contract and city staff.
Rowan said that at a previous job as a commissioner for the Atlanta Department of Transportation, a “cone of silence” was imposed on staff who were involved in working on contracts, which shielded them from attempts to influence or pressure them.
“We were not to meet with vendors about it, we were not to talk to people about it,” Rowan said. “Once the procurement starts, we’re not talking to the proposers.”
Representatives for Allied and Marina contacted Rowan about Oakland’s security contract, which he found uncomfortable. Rowan said he refused to speak with representatives for Allied after a council meeting. “I just told them we have nothing to talk about.”
Rowan said Marina’s lobbyist, Isaac Kos-Read, reached out to him over email.
“I spoke with the City Attorney’s office and there’s a way to get this done by next Tuesday, responding to the City Council’s direction to submit a revised recommendation going with the highest scoring local company, Marina Security Services,” Kos-Read wrote in an email to Rowan on July 8, after the Public Works committee meeting.
Kos-Read wrote that the city would need to produce a report “based on information and feedback” from the committee hearing, which would then be reviewed and approved by the City Attorney. “Then Council would have to make an urgency finding (5 of 8 votes), which I think there would be support for, at next Tuesday’s meeting, and it could be voted.”
According to Rowan, Kos-Read also approached him on July 25 at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Maia Correia Bikeway near Lake Merritt, which is named after a four-year-old girl who was struck and killed by a car door while biking with her father.
Rowan said in an interview that Kos-Read told him Public Works should change its position on the security services contract and that he needed to be more in tune with the racial balance of contracts in the city.
In emails to other officials, Kos-Read pointed out that a racial disparity study conducted by Oakland in 2019 found that African Americans were awarded only 0.91% of professional services prime contracts between 2011 and 2016.
Kos-Read told The Oaklandside he has raised this issue throughout the procurement process for the security contract, but he didn’t recall if he discussed this with Rowan at the groundbreaking ceremony.
“I thought it was clear what came out of the City Council meeting, which was that the council disagreed with the staff recommendation and thought there should be a greater consideration of things like racial equity in contracts,” Kos-Read said in an interview.
Kos-Read identified several challenges with the process for this contract. He noted that Marina emailed city staff each month starting late last year to check in about the contract process, given the delays, and never received responses. Kos-Read also tried to get in touch with Rowan and didn’t hear back. He also noted that Oakland staff said they published ads for the request for proposals in newspapers that no longer circulate. Based on public records, it appears the city did publish ads in several existing papers. But some newspapers that no longer exist may have been mistakenly included in city reports as holdovers from prior years.
Marina Security’s CEO Sam Tadesse told The Oaklandside that his firm works with many public agencies and he feels there are several issues with Oakland’s contracting process, including delays and inconsistencies around policy priorities. In an email, Tadesse wrote that if the City Council rejects a staff recommendation after hearing public testimony at a meeting, staff should incorporate that feedback into a revised proposal “or at least explain why they are not before trying to ram through the same rejected recommendation.”
Rowan also raised concerns with the city about Oakland’s decentralized procurement process, in which some departments take the lead in selecting contracts.
City Administrator Jestin Johnson said he sees issues with this system, too. He told The Oaklandside that a city of Oakland’s size shouldn’t have a decentralized procurement process because it results in “too many transactions and too many contracts going in and out the door that makes it more of a convoluted process, and there’s so much inconsistency.” He said centralizing procurement could help address some of the lobbying issues that Rowan finds troubling.
Johnson said he’s discussed contracting issues with Mayor Barbara Lee and the City Auditor Michael Houston. And he noted that former Finance Director Erin Roseman hired the consulting firm Baker Tilly to assess Oakland’s contracting system, which he said resulted in several critical recommendations. The Oaklandside has requested those recommendations and will potentially report on them in the future.
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Who is getting the “kick backs”?