The city set the per-cab minimum at $3,000.
The two highest bidders, Visum and Apache, promised the city nearly six times that: $19,777 and $16,176 per cab. But both Visum and Apache said they could handle only the minimum number of cabs, 20 each.
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AAA Cab had the third-highest bid, just $115 per cab less than Apache. And AAA said it would be willing to cover all 180 cabs needed at the airport, if necessary.
So when the two highest bidders were interested only in the bare minimum, that left 140 cabs for AAA. That's more than twice the number of cabs that AAA currently supplies at the airport. It also knocks AAA's big rival, Discount, right out of the airport contract.
No matter what happens to Visum and Apache, AAA will now manage at least 75 percent of the airport cabs. Not bad for a company that spent the past nine years sharing its turf equally with two competitors.
I talked to AAA executives on Monday. They insist the whole thing was on the up-and-up. They recently lost a contract to provide limos at the airport; they learned their lesson and bid higher this time. They say it's a lucky coincidence that the other top bidders went for the minimum and left a bigger piece of the pie for them.
But executives at Discount Cab are concerned that there may be more to the story.
Now, Discount has good reason to have sour grapes, as they admit. But after sitting down with its executives last week, I'm convinced many of their concerns are real.
For one thing, both the company's president, Mike Pinckard, and its risk manager, LaMonte K. Jackson, were willing to go on the record. That's always refreshing.
For another, they have the numbers to back up their argument — spreadsheets showing how they arrived at their proposal and how paying the city $19,777 per cab can't possibly sustain itself in this economy.
Pinckard and Jacson are worried that Visum and Apache overbid so badly that there's no way their business model will work — especially because they lack the economies of scale of larger cab operations. "I'd be amazed if they last six months," Pinckard told me.
And that might mean their cabs would revert to the only winning bidder capable of putting 180 cabs in play: AAA. (When questioned about the possibility by New Times, Deputy Aviation Director Deborah Ostreicher didn't rule it out. However, she said if there's enough time left on the contract, the city would prefer to go with the next qualified company on the list.)
Discount executives are worried that the fix is in.
"There's only one possible combination of bidders that would allow AAA to have the maximum number of cabs at the airport, and that's the one we have," Jackson says. "There's so many coincidences that it can't be a coincidence."
Indeed, there's clear evidence that the upstart companies are, at minimum, acquaintances. One of Apache's owners, Abbas Naini, knows one of Visum's owners, 29-year-old Soroosh Ghafaripanah. The two purchased a Scottsdale condo together in 2006. And at one point, according to the database at www.intelius.com, Ghafaripanah used Naini's limo company as his address. (Neither Ghafaripanah or Naini responded to messages seeking comment.)
But do Visum and Apache also know AAA?
Discount executives say they're concerned about just this possibility. At a recent industry conference in Las Vegas, they say, AAA's owners were hanging out with Abbas Naini, the guy who started Apache Taxi just one week before the city opened the RFP process.
And, at the city's meeting to announce the winning bidders, Naini sat with the owners of AAA, Jackson and Pinckard say.
"At the end of the meeting, Naini walked out with [the vice president of AAA]," Pinckard says.
To that, the guys at AAA just laugh. Hossein Dibazar, the company's general manager, acknowledges that he and his partner are Iranian, as is Naini. And, he says, they've been aware of him for years. But "we don't get along," he says.
"I'm not going to tell him the secrets of my business," he says. Naini, he adds, came to ask for advice after the city recommended Naini's bid be accepted — and AAA intends to help his company learn the ropes just as they helped Discount Cab nine years ago.
For the record, AAA regrets giving that help. "We created monsters out of these people," says Van Means, a director at AAA.
But I'm not so sure Discount doesn't have point. Taken together, the connections certainly raise questions.
And that's why it's so disturbing that the city has shown no interest in asking them. Questioned about Visum's UPS Store address, Ostreicher says only that the company meets the city's requirements. She's also not worried about possible collusion: "Our research with the Arizona Corporation Commission shows that the three recommended proposers are independently owned taxicab companies."
Despite concerns from taxi drivers in attendance, the recommended list of Visum, Apache, and AAA sailed through the city's airport advisory committee last month and was sent to the city council aviation subcommittee.
At that meeting last week, there were no fewer questions. But the council members in attendance were distinctly uninterested in exploring them.
