Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in July that the administration would seek no new contracts for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. By then costs had blown past $17 million. Then came another one.
Federal spending records show the National Park Service handed American Ag Energy Inc. a contract of nearly $2.7 million, with the company due to maintain, repair and rebuild water purification and sewage treatment equipment, Yahoo News Australia reported on September 3. The award went out the week before. Yahoo put the figure at $2.65 million.
How the bill grew
President Donald Trump first said the refurbishment could be done fast, for $1.5 million, in time for the White House-backed Fourth of July celebrations. It did not stay there. Costs climbed to nearly $7 million after a no-bid contract went to Atlantic Industrial Coatings LLC, a Virginia firm that apparently had never held a federal contract. That company later won $6.2 million in May, $1 million on June 3 and more than $461,000 on June 15.
The pool was repainted a dark blue and fitted with what Yahoo described as “advanced nanobubbler technology” to fight algae. It did not hold. Once workers refilled it, the algae came back and the new blue sealant began to peel and float to the surface. Crews fenced off the monument and drained the pool again to redo the work.
Last month, Ohio-based Green Water Solutions, also called Greenwater Services, was awarded $1.8 million for a water-purification system. Add the latest award and the project’s total stands at no less than $19.1 million, by Yahoo’s count.
The new contractor
American Ag Energy’s founder and CEO, Richard Rosen, told NBC News his firm thinks it can beat the algae. He had read about the problem in The New York Times. “I read about it in The New York Times, and I said, you know what, I can fix this problem,” he said.
None of these contracts went through competitive bidding. The administration argued the renovation was so urgent that delay would cause “serious injury” to the government. What that injury would have been has not been explained.
A vandalism case unravels
The pool has also landed in court. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss the case against David Hearn, 67, a former Olympian her office had accused of tearing out the Trump-requested blue liner. Her office conceded in the filing that the “American flag blue” sealant began to peel “almost immediately” after installation. The Interior Department, the filing said, determined that the “damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”
