Cothran

Go, Team, Go
Last week, I marveled at the moxie of longtime mayoral pal Jacqueline Besser, telling a little story about what seemed to be funny business at the Municipal Railway involving controversy over a $66 million city contract to arrange public transportation for the disabled.

But I must apologize. Last week, I had an incomplete picture of Madame Besser. It turns out she is more impressive than I was able to say. The power she and her husband, lobbyist-lawyer Stephen Besser, wield in San Francisco seems truly marvelous. In just the last few years, these relative newcomers to San Francisco have managed to snag pieces of at least two juicy city contracts, and appear to have a good angle on participating in a couple more. And they've done it with relatively little in their corner.

Except, it seems, an almost golden connection to Willie Brown.
The Besser moxie apparently began to work its magic almost immediately after the pair left Los Angeles and arrived in San Francisco, following their longtime pal, Willie Brown, who'd just been elected mayor. Stephen and Willie had worked together at the same law firm; Willie had appointed Jacqueline to the California Commission on Aging. And now they were all back together in one city again.

Soon, Stephen started representing a garage-management firm that was making a run at city contracts. His wife became attached to one of the firm's bids in early 1997, and, selling herself (quite properly) as a minority contractor, she appears to have provided the extra push her husband's client needed to win a nearly $1 million-per-year contract to manage two city parking garages.

I do not know whether Jackie Besser has any experience in running garages or in providing security for them -- the two things she purportedly performs under the 1997 contract with the San Francisco Parking Authority, a division of the Department of Parking and Traffic. Neither she nor her husband returned my phone calls. Public records list her company, Daja Inc., as a marketing consultant firm. The director of the Parking Authority, Bob Davis, says, "I've never asked her about her qualifications." A joint venture agreement she struck with her husband's client in relation to the parking-management bid says simply that "Daja, Inc., is a women-owned minority corporation which provides, among other things, management consulting services."

At any rate, Jackie Besser wound up with a 42 percent stake in the garage contract after convincing city officials that she could help run and provide security for the two public garages. Eventually, Stephen's client, Parking Concepts Inc. of Irvine, and his wife, as a joint venture partner with PCI, won the competition and began managing the two garages in October 1997 -- after the city's Human Rights Commission, moving in truly mysterious ways, pulled the minority certification of Jackie's nearest competitor, a company that is minority-owned, that submitted a lower bid, and that already held the garage contracts.

But that seems to have been just the beginning of the moxie magic. Whether together or separately, the Bessers (or Team Besser, as I like to call them) have been quite successful in lobbying for, winning, and participating in city business. They are allied with a group poised to win a lucrative traffic management contract at the airport. They are involved with a company in the running to get the aforementioned $66 million disabled transit contract. And Stephen Besser, currently with the L.A.-based law firm of Lewis, D'Amato, Brisbois & Bisgaard, has been so persuasive as a lobbyist that he apparently has convinced a member of the San Francisco Health Services Commission that his client is the best firm to win a contract for long-term health coverage for city workers -- even before the contract for that coverage is put out for competitive proposals.

The picture is slowly coming into focus. Team Besser, it seems, has the type of moxie that works. Stephen lobbies with wondrous results, and his protean wife helps out by offering to do all sorts of tasks required by a juicy variety of city contracts.

Our first topic of discussion: Team Besser and two city parking garages, the St. Mary's Square Garage and the eponymously named 16th Street and Hoff Alley Garage.

In 1996, San Francisco's Parking Authority sought proposals on a management contract for both garages. The con-tracts, as it turned out, were worth nearly $800,000 a year to the winning contractor. Twelve companies inquired after the information necessary to bid on the garage contracts. Nine were San Francisco companies. One was from Oakland. Two were from Southern California.

One of the Southern California companies, Parking Concepts Inc., hired Stephen Besser as its lobbyist. Besser was working for an L.A. law firm at the time, Christensen, White, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser & Shapiro, LLP.

Willie Brown was already well-acquainted with Besser and the Christensen, White firm. Brown served the firm in an "of counsel" capacity -- that is, as an adviser to the firm, rather than a partner in it -- from July 1994 until he took office in January 1996 as the mayor of San Francisco. Soon after taking office, he entered into a strange arrangement whereby he "sold" Christensen, White the law offices of Willie L. Brown Jr. on an installment plan that has paid the mayor more than $10,000 a year for each of the last three years. As Besser was lobbying the Parking Authority on behalf of Parking Concepts Inc., his law firm was paying the mayor handsome sums of money for "buying" Brown's law firm.

In early 1997, the Department of Parking and Traffic narrowed the field of candidates for the management of the two garages in question. Parking Concepts Inc. and three San Francisco firms remained in the running. Being the only out-of-town firm vying against three local firms could have been a problem for Parking Concepts Inc. But PCI wound up with an advantage the other firms apparently couldn't match. A race and gender advantage.

Parking Concepts Inc., employs many minorities, but its management and ownership is, in San Francisco terms, problematically Caucasian. Only one management official, the head of security, is an ethnic minority.

In the competition for San Francisco city contracts, having minority- or women-owned subcontractors or co-owners can be the difference between winning and losing. And as we will see, Parking Concepts got the difference working in its direction.

PCI struck a joint venture agreement in February 1997 with Jacqueline Besser, an African-American woman, and her newly formed firm, Daja Inc. Though her company had been in existence a mere seven months, Jackie Besser became a 42.5 percent stakeholder in the joint venture. According to Human Rights Commission documents obtained by SF Weekly, her firm was to be in charge of business management and security matters for the two garages.

In the eight months between June 19, 1996, when Parking Concepts Inc. hired Stephen Besser as its lobbyist, and Feb. 6, 1997, when it struck its joint venture agreement with Daja Inc., the garage management company from Irvine, Calif., underwent quite a transformation. It went from being an all-white, out-of-town firm with essentially no political juice to a joint venture that included a local minority- and woman-owned firm, and that was represented by a lobbyist who was a close friend of the mayor.

The change seems to have suited the new joint venture, Parking Concepts/Daja Inc., well. The city's Human Rights Commission, which oversees the participation of minority- and women-owned businesses in city contracts, awarded Parking Concepts/Daja a 7.5 percent bidding advantage over its competitors. Such an advantage is meant to increase the ability of minority- and women-owned businesses to compete against larger and more established firms for city business.

Commission documents suggest that, before they gave the venture a significant advantage over other bidders, city staffers might have had reason to ask some pointed questions about Jackie Besser's role in the running of the garages.

First of all, Parking Concepts/Daja filed documents with the commission saying that Jackie Besser would be head of security for the two garages. But commission documents show that a major security firm, King Security Services Inc., would be receiving $176,000 a year to provide security services at the two garages. King Security Services is a $5.2 million-a-year company with several city contracts, including the job of providing security for the Municipal Railway. King Security Services Inc. is a 100 percent minority-owned firm.

Does this sound like a company in need of supervision from a woman who did not list security experience as one of her qualifications for receiving a city contract?

Madame Besser's other declared role in the joint venture -- that of business manager -- could also have raised eyebrows among commission staff.

According to a joint venture agreement signed by Besser on Feb. 6, 1997, the job of overseeing attendants and managing garage operations would be handled by Parking Concepts Inc. Jackie would merely be a business manager, whatever that means. Her role isn't more precisely defined in Human Rights Commission documents and the joint venture agreement related to these garage contracts. Moreover, the joint venture agreement says, business management affairs would also be handled in part by Parking Concepts Inc.

And when the HRC asked Jackie Besser to "describe the management of the joint venture," she and Parking Concepts Inc. identified the same person as the venture's business manager -- Jon Mark Morgan, a Parking Concepts Inc. employee.

Now, it would seem perfectly natural for Parking Concepts Inc. to offer its own employee as the person who will provide PCI's portion of the business management required by the parking garage venture. But why and how can Daja Inc. use an employee of another firm to fulfill its promised duties under the contract? Why not one of its own employees? Why not Besser?

I want to be fair to Besser. I don't want to think the worst. I don't want to suspect that Daja's part of the parking garage proposal involves primarily window dressing, rather than business opportunities for a minority firm.

But what is one to think when a minority company bids on city business, saying it will provide the services of a worker it does not even employ?

Bob Davis, the director of the city Parking Authority, says he isn't sure if Besser has any experience either in providing business management or security to parking garages. "I don't think she does," he says candidly.

But Davis thinks Besser is doing a fine job. And, he says, there is no question in his mind that she is intimately involved in the running of the garages and in providing the security.

"From what I can see she does a good job," he says. "She has become fairly astute at the business. I don't see her as a lame-duck partner. When we have meetings she is good. My guys like her. She seems to be conversant in operation procedures for the garage. I don't think of her as a front."

I wouldn't blame one party in the garage contracting process from thinking the worst about the contracting process for the St. Mary's and 16th and Hoff garages. I wouldn't begrudge the joint venture of Five Star/Universal Parking Inc. -- the firm that was running the garages prior to the election of Willie Brown and that lost the business to Team Besser -- that bitter pleasure at all.

You see, after the Parking Authority narrowed the field of bidders for the garage contracts to four, Five Star/Universal Parking was neck and neck with Parking Concepts/Daja Inc.

Actually, the firms were neck and neck only due to the intervention of the city's Human Rights Commission. Parking Concepts/Daja Inc.'s bid over five years (if two one-year extensions are exercised) was more than a quarter of a million dollars higher than Five Star/Universal Parking's bid. But the HRC adjusted Parking Concepts/Daja Inc.'s bid downward by 7.5 percent because of its minority bid preference. That is, because of Jackie Besser's involvement.

And it would take one more act by the Human Rights Commission to push Team Besser over the top.

Five Star/Universal also asked the Human Rights Commission for a 7.5 percent minority preference. If both companies had received the minority preference, Five Star/Universal's bid would have been lower.

"Would have" being the key phrase here.
A few weeks before the contract was awarded, the Human Rights Commission yanked the certification of Universal Parking Resources Inc. as a locally owned minority business.

The reasons for this decertification are strange, to say the least. In a letter to the Department of Parking and Traffic, the HRC said Universal Parking Resources Inc. was actually a Los Angeles-based company that was merely keeping its local offices at the parking garage it was managing, the St. Mary's Square Garage to be exact. That arrangement violated HRC guidelines. Universal also got dinged for supposedly using equipment owned by the prime contractor, Five-Star Parking Inc., rather than its own equipment.

With that ruling, the Five Star/Universal joint venture no longer had a minority bid preference.

William Walker, the president of Universal Parking Resources Inc., told me that the HRC reasoning didn't square with him. "They knew that was my address when they certified me [in 1996]. They knew all of it. They did their inspections and they certified me," Walker said. "All I can figure is someone wanted me decertified."

Since obtaining the garage contract, Team Besser seems to have been busy. Stephen and Jackie are trying to win the $66 million para-transit brokerage contract under consideration by the Public Transportation Commission. Over at San Francisco International Airport, Team Besser seems to have made more fruitful headway, winning a multimillion-dollar contract to manage the arrival and departure of limos, cabs, and shuttle-vans. They have been selected the lead bidder in the contest and have now entered exclusive negotiations over the terms of the arrangement, airport staff told me.

But the most impressive work either Besser appears to have accomplished involves the city's Health Services Commission.

This month the commission will begin drafting a request seeking proposals from companies for a plan that would provide city employees with long-term health care if they suffer debilitating or catastrophic medical conditions such as stroke, cancer, or AIDS.

Wait, did I say the commission was looking for companies that want to send in proposals?

What I meant to say is that the commission appears to already have a favorite company for the job, and that company, US Care, just so happens to be a client of Stephen Besser.

At least, I got the distinct feeling that taking proposals may be little more than a formality after talking to Commission Vice President Claire Zvanski.

I asked Zvanski how the commission learned about US Care's services.
Here's what she said: "From what I can remember, Besser called me about something else, and asked me, `What do you need?' And I said, `A long-term care plan. Do you know anyone?'"

Zvanski added that if the commission contracts with a company to provide employees with a long-term health plan, it would be her preference to give it to US Care. "Since US Care does the job, and does it damn well, we will probably go with them," she said. "If there's a better mousetrap, we'll look at it, but from what we can tell, US Care is the best out there."

George Cothran (gcothran@sfweekly.com) can be reached at SF Weekly, 185 Berry, Suite 3800, San Francisco,