Cheyenne city engineer: “We lied on our grant application”

March 26--CHEYENNE -- City Engineer Jim Voeller has broken his silence on his reasons for halting work on the Civic Center Commons project, alleging that a federal grant to fund the project was secured using false information about how much flood damage downtown Cheyenne regularly sustains.

Civic Center Commons is a combination drainage basin and community amenity featuring park space, an amphitheatre and other amenities meant to promote community gatherings and additional private investment in the city's West Edge downtown district. It is slated to be built across from the Cheyenne Municipal Building on O'Neil Avenue, and is being funded by 2012 sixth-penny sales tax dollars, grants from the Wyoming Business Council and the State Loan and Investment Board and, most significantly, a $3 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

For months, members of the Cheyenne City Council have expressed concern over the slow pace of the project. In late December, council members approved a resolution seeking timely completion of the Civic Center Commons. But with no apparent progress made since then, council members are now proposing an ordinance to create an oversight group for the project.

But emails retrieved by council members Rocky Case and Pete Laybourn show Voeller has directed design firm DHM to cease work on the project, even after the City Council passed its resolution in late December. Voeller himself confirmed that in a subsequent interview Friday, but suggested he had good reason for it.

Voeller said he intends to make a presentation to the City Council on Monday that he believes will show the original grant application to FEMA -- as well as a later workup done by a second consultant -- grossly overestimated the flood damage Cheyenne experiences from a typical two-year rain event. Voeller said that, in turn, provided the favorable cost-benefit analysis needed to secure FEMA's grant money.

Going through the appendices to the original grant application submitted to FEMA, Voeller pointed to a cost-benefit spreadsheet that he said shows estimated flood damages sustained by 105 properties in the lower Capitol Basin from a two-year rain event.

The consultant, he said, estimated those 105 properties can expect to sustain $19.7 million in damages. He said a second analysis done by another consultant boosted those figures to more than $28 million using the same computer program.

Voeller said one of the things he intends to share with the council Monday is a draft memo dated March 22 from an independent third-party consultant, Harvey Economics of Denver, which he and Mayor Marian Orr hired at the beginning of March to take another look at Cheyenne's FEMA grant application.

A draft copy of that memorandum provided to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle on Friday states that analyst Ed Harvey and his team found "two significant issues" with the application in their preliminary review. The first was that it based flood damage estimates on an apparent presumption that water in the streets would directly translate to water in people's homes, with no stormwater drains, curbs or gutters to stop it.

"The (cost-benefit) model presumes a direct relationship between water elevation in the street during a flooding event and the surrounding structures," Harvey wrote. "That is, a precipitation event that causes, for instance, a 4-inch-deep flow of water in the street will result in flooding impacts to surrounding buildings.

"Unlike homes in a flood plain near a stream, for the structures around the (Civic Center Commons) project, streets nearby should have some stormwater conveyance capacity if curbs and gutters are present," Harvey added. "Hence, a two-year storm event resulting in runoff that is less than 6 inches deep in the curb and gutter and is contained in the street will not cause any appreciable economic losses to neighboring buildings."

Harvey noted that he and his team "have not conducted field visits or other investigations to determine whether all of the streets in the project area have curb and gutters to convey runoff in the street."

The second issue, Harvey wrote, is Cheyenne's grant application seems to indicate that one-third of the buildings surrounding the project have their first floors between a few inches and as much as 8 feet below street level. If that were true, he wrote, those houses would flood virtually every time it rained enough to produce any runoff at all.

"Although we have not verified the hydraulic modeling assumptions ... this potential disconnect between street and first-floor elevations is highly suspect and worth further investigation," Harvey wrote.

Mike Vinson, a staff engineer for Cheyenne, said he first questioned the numbers in the grant application not long after they were submitted in late 2013. But he and Voeller alleged they were regularly shut out of meetings on the Civic Center Commons, and the project proceeded without engineering's input. Voeller said that changed after Mayor Orr's election, when she dismissed former Planning Services Director Brandon Cammarata and named Voeller as his interim replacement, as well as city engineer.

"Once I became city engineer and also the interim planning services director, I started looking for files (related to Civic Center Commons), looking for information, and I was appalled at what I found," he said. "Files had been rifled through, important papers were missing."

Voeller made plenty of other allegations Friday, including why he hasn't spoken up before now. He also provided numerous internal city memos dating back to Hall's time working in former Mayor Rick Kaysen's administration. As of this writing, the WTE was continuing to pore over those memos and will provide follow-up in the coming days.

Councilman Laybourn sent out a blast email Friday to members of the public who had attended previous open houses on the Civic Center Commons, asking them to come out to Monday's City Council meeting, when the ordinance will be on second reading. Later in the afternoon, he explained his concern over Voeller unilaterally holding up the project.

"When you're retrofitting a city for flood control, that's a very challenging project. However, protecting downtown 30-plus years since the (devastating) flood (of 1985), I think it's very intelligent to combine redevelopment efforts in the West Edge with the flood control," Laybourn said. "We're ready to make the kind of a big contemporary move like many other cities are doing, and we planned it, and we got the money for it, and we signed the contract (with design firm DHM).

"And now it's being stalled to the point that it's on life support."

Laybourn, along with Case, said Friday they are concerned that if the project isn't fully designed and ready to go out for construction bids later this year, Cheyenne stands a chance of losing the FEMA grant. Case said city correspondence with FEMA shows the agency is expecting the city to file a one-year grant extension by the time the current grant expires in September, but to do so, the city must first show significant progress on the project.

But Mayor Orr said Saturday she's inclined to believe Voeller, who first brought his concerns to her not long after Orr won the mayoral election last November. Orr said she had difficulty believing Voeller's claims at first, simply because they were so audacious. But as she has worked to piece together her own collection of documents and correspondence relating to Civic Center Commons' development, she's come to much the same conclusions.

"I have no reason to doubt where he's coming from because it comes not only from him, but also the previous city engineer, John Hall, and the previous city attorney, Dan White," Orr said, adding that she believes both men resigned in the middle of Kaysen's tenure because they wanted no part in the project.

Orr also agreed with Voeller that it's been difficult to track down a reliable timeline of how the FEMA grant was applied for and who knew what sorts of exaggerations or outright falsehoods were going into it. "There's been no central repository of paperwork for this project, and as far as being accountable to carrying out the grant, that, in itself, is very troubling to me."

Orr said that others in the city government appear to have asked questions about the Civic Center Commons grant, including City Treasurer Lois Huff. Orr said Huff pointed out in a Dec. 9, 2016, memo that neither FEMA money nor matching sixth-penny funds could be used to design the park elements of Civic Center Commons, only the stormwater controls -- yet that rule doesn't seem to have been followed.

Orr said the city's grant application also explicitly denies any soil contamination in the project area or any historic uses that could have contributed such contamination. That was in spite of the city previously securing an Environmental Protection Agency grant to establish a revolving loan fund to treat brownfield conditions throughout the entire lower Capitol Basin, including the parking lot where Civic Center Commons is slated to go.

"Within those (EPA) documents, we are calling out and admitting this parking lot across the street and the structures and homes to the north of it, the entire Capitol Basin, is a brownfield area," Orr said, adding that when she saw the city answered "no" to the same question in the FEMA grant application, she "just about threw up."

As far as why Orr hasn't been more public about her concerns, she said she has spent virtually her entire time in office working to forensically piece together exactly what happened, how, who was responsible and when. She said it was only recently that the disparate documents, emails and correspondence began to form a solid picture for her, one that she expected to become public within the next week, once Voeller made his case before the City Council.

"The documents have been so scattered throughout so many different departments, we've had to do a search of emails, we've had to hire outside independent counsel so I could basically make sure ... am I really reading and seeing what I'm seeing?" Orr said. "It's been through this 90 days of research and meetings and interviews with (the Wyoming Department of) Homeland Security (which serves as an interlocutor between the city and FEMA) and poring over past documents that I've been able to formulate some kind of timeline."

It's due to that research that Orr said she agrees with Voeller's intention to follow through with his presentation to the council Monday.

"I'm gonna present everything -- we've got a diagram to show that when we get everything else (meaning other stormwater projects in the area) done, only 70 acres of land will actually drain to this project," Voeller said. "We're gonna build this thing with FEMA money, we're going to sink 2.5 million of our own tax dollars into this thing, and they're going to come back and see we lied on our grant application ... and we also misled them on the cost-benefit ratio. And they're going to say, 'We want our money back.'"

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