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Ahead of a Portland School Board vote tonight on whether to award Texas-based construction firm Procedeo $61.5 million to perform bond program management services for the district over the next five years, a School Board member is drumming up public demand to delay the vote.
School Board member Virginia La Forte took to Facebook on Saturday to post a number of concerns she said she’d heard regarding the contract, which PPS awarded through a request for proposals process in mid-November. (The contract requires board approval.) In her post, La Forte wrote the board was receiving little time to review the materials—just one business day—and that there were concerns about scoring irregularities, Procedeo’s pricing model, and the firm’s out of state status, among other points.
“[This] decision will shape how our school buildings are planned, built, and cared for for years to come,” La Forte wrote in her post. “This isn’t about politics. It isn’t about personalities. It’s about our legal responsibilities as a Board and $61 million of taxpayer dollars that should be handled with care, transparency, and respect.”
The pushback arrived shortly before WW reported Monday that a runner-up bidder for the contract had filed a formal complaint against the district, suggesting the selection was rigged to favor Procedeo.
Since La Forte raised the issue, calls for increased scrutiny on the project have come from a couple other prominent figures. They include former School Board member Julia Brim-Edwards. (“$61 MILLION IN PORTLAND’S TAX DOLLARS HEADING TO TEXAS?” she wrote. “PPS BOARD being asked to approve a MASSIVE Contract for school bond work on Tuesday night. Not so fast please!”)
An employee with PPS’s Office of School Modernization, Keisha Locklear, has also sounded the alarm. Locklear, a licensed architect, delivered public comment at a board meeting in September—back then describing a firm that often underdelivered on “impossible” promises and that was draining morale in OSM. In a Sunday post to her public Facebook page, she wrote that bringing in Procedeo with that money would be equivalent to about 29 full time staff members at OSM, “for four projects that are already staffed.”
Locklear wrote that three of the evaluation committee members on the RFP did not have “substantive” training or experience in design or construction. The five person committee included Dana White, PPS’s senior director of real estate and construction; Deborah Kafoury, the district’s chief of staff; Jon Franco, PPS’s senior chief of operations; Linda Degman, a third-party construction and litigation attorney; and Stephen Effros, a senior project manager in OSM. As The Oregonian previously reported, Degman and Effros gave Procedeo the lowest scores across both rounds.
Most notably, Locklear wrote the $61 million—about 75% of the administrative budget from the 2025 bond—was overspending, given that Procedeo is entering in the middle of many of the heavy construction projects, and out of line with industry standards. The firm will receive a base compensation of $55 million with an incentive compensation for delivering projects on time and on budget.
“The highest-value project management work of programming, master planning, procurement, aligning to PPS standards, selecting major building systems is already complete or WELL underway,” Locklear wrote. “Paying top-dollar premiums once the hardest work is over does not align with industry practice or common sense.”
PPS spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment. In a staff memo dated Nov. 25, Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong wrote that staff recommend the approval of the Procedeo contract, writing that the district followed a standard and competitive RFP process “to select the most qualified firm.” (In winning, Procedeo beat out two local competitors, both with offices in Lake Oswego.)
The district initially brought in Procedeo in June on a $149,500 contract, just under the spending threshold that would require School Board approval, asking the firm to produce a comprehensive report outlining steps to streamline Jefferson’s construction and realize cost savings. That report, which WW obtained on Nov. 12, proposed shaving an entire year off the high school’s opening date by readying the bottom two floors for student use. It presented two other strategies that the district has previously rejected and notably did not estimate the costs of such a proposal.
Still, the district in September expanded its contract with Procedeo by $487,500 to give the firm oversight through December of its Office of School Modernization, which has struggled with turnover. Back then, a couple of School Board members sounded an alarm about the lack of a competitive bidding process and hesitated to approve the contract extension, but it ultimately passed with a 6-1 vote.
The staff memo notes that Procedeo’s construction is 4% of “estimated combined remaining budgets” for the three remaining high school modernizations, construction for the Center for Black Student Excellence, and administrative oversight of OSM.
La Forte’s move to air concerns on social media raised some additional tensions between board members.
School Board member Rashelle Chase-Miller tells WW she thinks La Forte’s narrative leaves out key parts of the story, including that Procedeo has established a local office in Portland and that staff had been “very responsive” to any questions La Forte had raised.
Chase-Miller adds that while she has “a lot of respect” for the OSM team, there have been some significant delays and cost overruns on projects. “It’s important to acknowledge the challenges they’ve faced,” she says, adding the superintendent’s job is to work with all those moving parts. Not acknowledging those challenges, she says, is another glaring omission of context.
“I think board governance is most effective when it happens in the boardroom, with board members, the superintendent, staff and legal present, ensuring clarity and accuracy in what’s shared,” Chase-Miller says. “I agree wholeheartedly that the public needs access to this information, but I also believe that the public deserve the whole picture and not just the personal opinions of one board member.”
School Board Chair Eddie Wang says he doesn’t see the board as “rubber stamping” the Procedeo contract if it goes through on Tuesday. Rather, he says that if the district wants to build things on budget and on time, it will require some significant change.
“We have charged the superintendent to find ways to cut costs so we have more money for HVAC and seismic,” he says. “She is doing exactly that.”
In follow-up with WW, La Forte says she posted because she felt the tight timeline would limit the public’s “ability to be part of the feedback loop.” She says she has concerns about percentage-based pricing and is struggling with selecting a firm that doesn’t have an Oregon or West Coast base. (It does, though its presence in a coworking space in the Pearl District is relatively new in relation to Turner & Townsend Heery, the runner up firm for the contract that appealed last week, but was rejected.)
“I want to be clear that I support our superintendent; she’s navigating an intricate system and a lot of pressure,” La Forte says. “But part of our job as a Board is to ask difficult questions so the district can make the strongest possible decisions. I’m not advocating for any specific firm—just for a transparent, well supported process that gives the public a meaningful opportunity to weigh in.”
