The feds continued to lay the ground work in the Kwame Kilpatrick corruption trial in downtown Detroit on Monday, calling a Detroit water department official to the stand who testified about the shenanigans behind a major city contract.
Tresa Baldas and Jim Schaefer of the Free Press reported that official Daniel Edwards testified that Kilpatrick's close friend and co-defendant Bobby Ferguson (man pictured to the left) landed a major contract even though he was not the lowest bidder.
They wrote:
Edwards testimony officially kicked off the government's extortion chapter as he told jurors that Ferguson's company got a cut of a $16.3-million water main contract in 2006, even though another company had bid significantly lower -- $14.3 million. A never-before-used mathematical formula helped make that happen, he said.
Edwards said that Ferguson's company, part of a joint venture called Detroit Project Management, won the contract after his boss asked him to compute a new bid-ranking formula. That involved taking the seven bids that had come in, adding them up, finding the average, and then picking those who came closest to the average bid. This eliminated those with the highest and lowest bids, he said.
Edwards said he had never done a bid formula like that, and that he found it unusual, especially in the middle of a bidding process
