PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland’s top attorney says the city is legally obligated to keep buying parking meters from a Swedish company despite a bribery scandal.
Questions about Cale Group and its meters have lingered since the city’s former parking manager was sent to prison for taking bribes from the company, reported The Oregonian.
Investigators said that the parking manager, Ellis McCoy, took $200,000 in cash and travel favors over 10 years from two executives at Cale. McCoy was sentenced to two years in prison in 2015.
Cale announced last year that it found no criminal wrongdoing in the bribery allegations, which relate to a 2006 contract. But nearly 150 pages of newly-released records show that city investigators wrestled with Cale over their access to facts from the company’s internal investigation. Stoll Berne, an outside law firm hired by Portland, reported several problems that forced investigators to essentially take Cale’s lawyers at their word.
“Our ability to cross-check the diligence and adversarial nature of the investigation was substantially limited by the Special Committee’s refusal to allow us to review original witness interview notes, documents, emails and other source materials,” Stoll Berne wrote in an October 2015 report.
In December, Portland city attorneys were allowed confidential access to emails and documents tied to the investigation. City attorneys did not report that they ever reviewed the final report, but details were shared verbally with city officials.
City Attorney Trace Reeve told officials in late December that Portland has no legal ground to end its contract. Officials now plan to install about 360 parking meters in Northwest Portland.
“I think that it’s time for us to move past 2006 and install some parking meters in 2016,” Commissioner Steve Novick told The Oregonian on Tuesday. Novick, who oversees the Portland Bureau of Transportation, called Cale’s investigation “extensive.”
“To me, the fact that they let two people go and reassigned another shows that they took this seriously,” Novick said Tuesday.
He emphasized that there is no evidence of any impropriety tied to the city’s most recent contract with Cale.
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