The former Cleveland City Council member who recently took a job with Flock Safety says he had no role in the city’s no-bid contract with the company.
Kerry McCormack resigned from City Council to join Flock’s public affairs staff in October. Later that month, council introduced legislation to approve the Bibb administration’s proposed contract with the company. It has not yet passed.
Asked about McCormack during a committee hearing in November, Safety Director Wayne Drummond said the former council member’s new job had “absolutely nothing to do” with the contract.
McCormack said the same in a phone call with Weekly Chatter this week.
“I had no engagement with [Drummond], the [police] chief, the mayor, anybody else, on the proposal,” he said.
After accepting the job, McCormack consulted with Law Director Mark Griffin and city Chief Ethics Officer Delanté Spencer Thomas about how to handle potential conflicts between his new role at Flock and his old one at City Hall, he said.
McCormack said he will avoid working with Cleveland City Hall as a Flock representative for the next year — a standard limit required by Ohio’s “revolving door” ethics law. He did not seek an opinion from the Ohio Ethics Commission on the matter because he was voluntarily following the one-year rule, he said.
“Whether I have a defined legal conflict or not, regardless, it’s best practice I think to sit out [for] a year from engaging the city of Cleveland,” he said.
He added: “There is a whole separate part of our team internally that is handling Cleveland, and I am not a part of that.”
City officials told council members this month that they did not solicit multiple proposals before selecting Flock. In a legislative summary, the Bibb administration wrote that the company was the only vendor offering the specific services it was looking for.
At the council hearing, a ShotSpotter executive said he hoped his company would “have the opportunity to participate in that evaluation process.”
