Trustee cleared in flap over contract
Company listed wrong address
2:00 a.m. June 6, 2009
CHULA VISTA — No, everyone seems to agree now. The construction firm that got a $7 million contract from the Sweetwater Union High School District board last week is not located in the home of a board member's relative.
A construction industry Web site that compiles such minutiae mistakenly gave Rialto-based RC Construction a Chula Vista address. No big deal, except that the erroneous address happens to belong to the nephew of board member Arlie Ricasa.
“Peculiar,” Ricasa called it. “Bizarre,” said the school board's attorney.
To the attorney for a construction company that competed against RC Construction for the job but lost, it's suspicious.
“How is it possible that the address that they put to RC Construction, out of all the millions out there, belongs to Arlie Ricasa's (relative)?” asked Andrew Berman, attorney for HAR Construction in Chula Vista.
In an e-mail to Sweetwater attorney Kris Vaca that was part of the public record of the meeting, Brian Tyson of Reed Construction Data wrote, “We mistakenly added RC Const. Chula Vista, a company that had been in our database since 1995.”
Tyson did not return a phone call and an e-mail seeking further clarification.
Tyson's e-mail states that Reed has corrected its mistake and now lists RC Construction's proper Rialto address. RC Construction says it has never had a Chula Vista address.
“This is information that was totally inaccurate,” Ricasa said.
She said that neither she nor anyone she knows of in her family has a connection to RC Construction. Her nephew Domingo Ricasa, who owns and lives in the home at the Chula Vista address, works for a telephone company, she said.
Sweetwater attorney Bonifacio Garcia vetted the matter, concluded that it was all a big mistake and cleared Ricasa to vote on the contract. Ricasa said she regularly recuses herself on votes that affect Southwestern College, where she works, or community organizations for which she serves as a board member.
But she has no connection whatsoever to RC Construction, she said, and she participated in the vote on May 27.
In 2003, a grand jury report faulted Sweetwater – but not Ricasa specifically – for appointing Ricasa's husband to the volunteer citizens committee in charge of overseeing the work done through a $187 million bond measure passed in 2000. The grand jury did not allege any wrongdoing.
Chris Moran: (619) 498-6637;
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jun/06/1sz6ricasa195912-trustee-cleared-flap-over-contrac/?metro
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