Tucson Weekly: Smoking Guns (June 12

A Poorly Run U.S. Forest Service Tries To Bury Its Garbage Instead Of Packing It Out.
By Jim Nintzel
LAST MONTH, THE Skinny carried a bit detailing how U.S. Forest Service officials had refused to tell The Weekly how many bids they'd received for a safety survey of the Tucson Rod and Gun Club's Sabino Canyon shooting range ("On Top Of Old Smokey," Tucson Weekly, May 1).
Currents Anyone who's followed the Forest Service's decision to close the gun range is familiar with that particular safety survey. Forest Service officials paid $25,000 to Glen Shumsky, a high-school drop-out who counted among his accomplishments a degree from one of our country's finest mail-order diploma mills. Shumsky was hired to determine any dangers posed by the Rod and Gun Club's range, which had operated without a serious accident since the 1950s. The same federal officials later signed a second contract with Shumsky, paying him $100 an hour to testify on their behalf when the results of the survey were challenged in court by Gun Club lawyers.
In early court hearings related to that lawsuit, local attorney Dave Hardy was able to demonstrate so many distortions in Shumsky's résumé that U.S. District Court Judge John Roll ruled Shumsky had been impeached.
We wondered how Shumsky landed this contract, so we asked Sylvia Nuñez, who'd handled the bids on the job, how many people had expressed an interest in doing it.
Nuñez refused to disclose that information to The Weekly, saying we'd have to file a Freedom of Information Act request, which we did. At the time, we predicted Shumsky had filed the sole bid.
Guess what? We were right. Documents recently released to The Weekly from the Forest Service show Shumsky was the only person to apply for the job.
But even more interesting are the documents the Forest Service failed to turn over to The Weekly, which we obtained from another source.
Mark Kaplan, who coordinates Freedom of Information Act requests for the Forest Service, insists the agency's failure to hand over the documents "was done, certainly, unintentionally.... Our contracting office is right here in the office in downtown Tucson, and that's as far as we thought we needed to go as far as answering your request. We had no idea there might have been other items out there based on your request that we may have needed to provide you."
Which is curious, because the memos in question were released in another Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Tucson Rod and Gun Club's attorney. You'd think the coordinator for Freedom of Information Act requests would have some idea these records existed, since Forest Service bureaucrats had recently put together a similar package.
Intentional or not, the withheld notes and email messages paint a picture of financial concerns regarding the study which are strikingly different from the official package of information provided by the Forest Service.
According to the leaked documents, on November 25, 1996, Forest Service staffer Bill Lewis first sent email to Coronado National Forest Supervisor John McGee, asking for $5,000 to $7,000 to conduct the safety survey.
A few weeks later, Forest Service staffers Sylvia Nuñez and Pat Spoerl had an electronic exchange in which Nuñez said she was "guessing the quotes will be above the Govt. Estimate of $7,000. Might want to start thinking about where the additional monies will come from."
"There is a mgmt code set up with $10,000 in...funds for this and other project needs during the year," Spoerl replied. "If most of the funds are used for this we'll have very little for other work."
Finally, there's a hand-written note from Nuñez to McGee, dated December 17, 1996, which says, "We received one quote from Glen Shumsky in the amount of $25,000." The word "one" is underlined twice.
Nuñez expressed several concerns in the memo, including:
• "How much are we willing to pay?";
• "Is there money available"; and,
• "Need to justify awarding for this amount since it's way above government estimate of $7-8,000."
Somewhere along the line--although Forest Service officials haven't yet turned over any records documenting the process--the money became available. An email message to Nuñez dated January 6--one of the few the Forest Service was able to track down--reads, "There are sufficient funds to cover award of $25,000 for the risk assessment of the TR&GC site." A second sentence in the email message was redacted by the government before the document was released to The Weekly.
The paper trail sketches an agency desperate for a safety survey--so desperate that when a bid came in at three times the government estimate from a man with no experience in ballistics, they thought they were getting a great deal.
In a review of the proposal, an evaluation team found the price of Shumsky's proposal scored four on a scale from one to five (five being "excellent").
"Although the government estimate was considerably lower than the proposal, the team felt that for the quality of product that it would receive the price is reasonable."
Such quality--a report so questionable that a federal judge said its author "was impeached regarding his technical knowledge of ballistics."
Coronado National Forest Supervisor John McGee denies the agency tried to cover up the budgeting process by failing to release the embarrassing documents. In fact, he says the agency complied with The Weekly's request.
"We did not 'withhold' these or any other documents you may have," McGee wrote in a letter to The Weekly, responding to our query about the unreleased documents. "We did provide you with the documents that we believe meet your request."
In other words, McGee apparently thinks memos which discuss concern about an out-of-control spiraling of costs to be unrelated to "notes, memos, or other supporting materials regarding...the budgeting process," which was our specific request to the agency.
In his letter's conclusion, McGee wrote, "We tailor the search to best meet the interest of the requester and the taxpayer (searches are very costly)."
Let's leave aside the point that these documents had already been collected for a previous records request and assume McGee is sincere in his efforts to save taxpayer dollars.
Where was that fiscal concern when the prevaricating Glen Shumsky walked in the door with a bid that was more than three times the government's estimate? And why did McGee allow his staff to make a second deal with Shumsky, paying him $100 an hour, up to $17,000?
Guess budgetary concerns are only vital when it comes to stonewalling the public.
Illustration by Joe Forkan

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