The $300 million contract from Montana

Whitefish Energy Holdings was, by 2017, a two-year-old company founded in 2015 in Whitefish, Montana — a town of some 7,000 people — by a lineman named Andy Techmanski. Before that October, the largest contract the company had handled was worth $1.4 million. That is the company PREPA, Puerto Rico's public power utility, chose to hand a no-bid contract worth up to $300 million to repair grid infrastructure damaged by Hurricane María.

The size of that leap — from a prior maximum job of $1.4 million to a no-bid $300 million award — was enough by itself to draw national scrutiny. Whitefish received a $3.7 million advance payment as part of the deal, and the contract's own terms claimed FEMA had approved it. FEMA said it had not.

The New York Times coverage added another layer: Whitefish's subcontracted linemen, doing the real repair work on the ground, were reportedly paid far less than Whitefish billed PREPA for that same labor: nearly 17 times the average local wage for that kind of work, according to the Times.

The contract became a symbol almost immediately: not just of a bad procurement decision, but of how chaotic and poorly supervised the post-María recovery had become in its first weeks, at a moment when hundreds of thousands of people were still without power. Public scrutiny eventually forced the contract's cancellation, but the episode left a lasting mark on how the recovery's early months are remembered: an island in crisis, and a $300 million contract landing with a company barely equipped to handle it.

It also fed a broader distrust that would shadow Puerto Rico's recovery for years. If a public utility could award a $300 million repair contract, with no bidding, to a two-year-old company from a town of 7,000 people, without the FEMA approval it claimed to have, residents reasonably asked what other decisions were being made about their recovery, and on whose behalf.

Sources: Whitefish Energy. Freeze 2026-08-22.