Emails & AECOM invoices for PennDOT’s Survey
The short version this blog post: I did another RTKL request for AECOM’s correspondence with PennDOT about the I-95 CSP project, AECOM’s invoices, and AECOM’s memoranda. Several documents are posted in full at the bottom of this page.
Here is the actual blog post:
PennDOT did a survey about its plans for I-95 in South Philly, and publicized results in what some may call a misleading way. Some of this was apparently done by AECOM, a contractor PennDOT hired. AECOM has a $3.9 million contract with PennDOT for, in part, public engagement around the I-95 plans:
So far, AECOM has billed the hardworking taxpayers of Pennsylvania about $2.5 million dollars on this contract. One thing you might do is search the PA Treasury Department’s database for all of the contracts AECOM has been awarded in the past 5 years or so and add up how much money we pay them. https://contracts.patreasury.gov/search.aspx
Earlier this year, I did a RTKL request to PennDOT to see if any of our elected officials had been in contact with PennDOT about this. There were not a lot of responsive documents. Since then, PennDOT has done some outreach to the below state and city officials about community meetings:
There still doesn’t appear to be a lot of communication between legislators and PennDOT about this (although the way I worded my request might not fully capture all existing documents).
Rep Fiedler is very concerned with facilitating community meetings! She sent PennDOT an email about it. She told the Inquirer the same thing! But neither she nor any of our other elected officials actually said “hey PennDOT don’t spend $800 million on a highway widening project here.”
In this Inquirer article, Mike Newall referred to me as a "concerned blogger" which is such a sick burn lol
What is PennDOT saying about Philly’s reps here??
Here are the emails and some other documents in full:
This email was produced in a separate folder labeled “attachments” for some reason. I think this might be the most interesting one of the bunch!