The Cole County Courthouse in downtown Jefferson City (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).
The Missouri attorney general’s office is asking a Cole County judge to dismiss a lawsuit alleging a state agency violated competitive bidding laws to steer lucrative technology contracts to a well-connected company.
The lawsuit, filed in May by a longtime state employee named Rodney Rice, alleges “deliberate bias” toward St. Louis-based World Wide Technology in awarding state IT contracts.
World Wide Technology is one of the largest privately-held companies in the country. It was founded by David Steward, a prolific Missouri political donor who has contributed $2.3 million to mostly Republican campaigns over the last decade.
The company has been paid $53 million by the state over the last two years.
The state gave World Wide Technology numerous unfair advantages over its competitors, Rice alleges in his lawsuit, violating state procurement law and exposing the state to potential liability if anyone found out.
When he brought his concerns to his supervisors, Rice alleges he was admonished for being an “obstructionist” and demoted.
Both World Wide Technology and the Office of Administration, which handles contracting for state government, deny the accusations.
In a motion filed last week, Assistant Attorney General Justin Mettlen argues that the allegations made by Rice do not violate any law, rule or regulation. Any alleged “mismanagement,” Mettlen contends, merely represents a disagreement between Rice and his supervisor’s decision making in procurement and awarding state contracts.
Nothing that Rice allegedly reported to his supervisors, Mettlen writes, can be considered “prohibited activity.” Thus, he should not be considered a whistleblower.
“Plaintiff’s acknowledgement that the law allows (the Office of Administration) discretion in making contracts short circuits his allegations that he reported actual unlawful conduct,” Mettlen writes.
Rice says in his lawsuit that he began to suspect bias toward World Wide Technology in state IT contracts after realizing one of the company’s former employees was leading the State Data Center.
World Wide Technology won “a majority of the state’s ‘infrastructure’ contracts even in cases where it did not submit the lowest bid,” Rice alleges. “In fact, (the company) had been awarded one contract even though it had submitted the highest bid, which was millions of dollars more than the bids from other approved vendors.”
Though Missouri has rules permitting the selection of “clearly inferior bids,” the lawsuit states, “none of those rules had been followed in the case of (World Wide Technology).”
Rice says his concerns were heightened when he learned the state provided a current employee of World Wide Technology key card access to an office in the Truman State Office Building in Jefferson City, a privilege he says no other vendors are provided.
He later learned the state was using World Wide Technology contractors to work on the preparation of a new project that had not yet been put out to bid, “which would give (World Wide Technology) an unfair advantage in the bidding process.”
In early 2024, Rice alleges, World Wide Technology was allowed to change the terms of a project after it had already been sent out to vendors for competitive bids. World Wide Technology would be paid for time and materials, the lawsuit states, regardless of whether it met benchmarks laid out in the project proposal that was previously provided to its competitors.
Concerned that awarding the contract to World Wide Technology based on “far more favorable terms” would likely violate state law, Rice says he spoke to the Office of Administration’s legal department for advice.
He says he was advised by the agency’s attorneys to stop the entire bid process and reissue a revised request to ensure that all vendors had a fair chance at winning the bid.
But that was later overruled by his supervisor, who Rice alleges told him to let the bid process proceed unabated without notice to the other vendors. Soon after, Rice says he was given the choice of demotion or being placed on a performance improvement plan, which he understood would have led to his dismissal “after sufficient time to paper his file.”
Calling the decision a “Hobson choice,” Rice says he “accepted” a demotion and a pay cut on April 16, 2024.
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