SPRINGFIELD — Developer FDS MA Liberty Junction LLC had its day in court, going before Judge Jeremy Bucci, as he listened to arguments from rival developers who argued that Liberty Junction should be blocked from building the new Springfield Regional Justice Center.
USPB JV, LLC and Springfield Tower Square, LLC, which are owned by James E. “Jeb” Balise and Dinesh Patel, respectively, filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance’s conditional selection of Liberty Junction as the winning bid for the Justice Center project.
At the preliminary injunction hearing on Aug. 11, John Butts, attorney for the plaintiffs, argued that the primary issue with the selection of is that one of the company’s four partners, John Barros, had a conflict of interest because he is the interim executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, a governmental agency.
Liberty Junction’s attorney, Marwan Zubi, countered that Barros was named to that role in early February, after Liberty Junction submitted its bid to the state weeks earlier. Among the documents Zubi submitted to the court was an email exchange showing that Barros had sought guidance from the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission in mid-January ahead of officially being named to the post. According to that email chain, Barros was advised by the commission to file a disclosure form if Liberty Junction’s bid was selected. On July 1, the day after the conditional selection was made, Barros filed a disclosure form.
Nicholas Ogden, an attorney for DCAMM, said the plaintiff’s conflict of interest claim against DCAMM was improper because under the state’s conflict of interest laws, it is the responsibility of the employee to avoid conflicts, and not an agency or employer.
After the plaintiffs filed the motion regarding the preliminary injunction, Barros withdrew as a stakeholder in Liberty Junction. Williams and Mann said Barros withdrew so as not to be a “distraction.” He has not divested from CoJo Partners.
While the main issue raised by Butts was the conflict of interest, he also stated that the experience of the Liberty Junction team, one of the reasons it was selected for the Justice Center project, has been diminished by Barros’s departure. He said the bios for Barros and Harris were placed at the top of the documentation submitted to DCAMM by Liberty Junction because their “insider status” was important. However, Ogden noted that the filings by the Trial Court and DCAMM explaining the reasoning behind the selection made no mention of Barros.
Butts also took issue with DCAMM’s willingness to waive certain requirements in the final contract, language that was written into the request for proposals. “Who are they doing that for?” Butts asked rhetorically. He presented it as a double standard that was only allowed for “heads of state agencies and spouses of members of Congress.” Conan Harris, the other partner in CoJo Partners, is the husband of U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
Ogden said the plaintiff’s case was a “hodgepodge of factual inaccuracies.” He described Butts’s claim that DCAMM put politics over the public interest was “meritless and said the selection process was not arbitrary and capricious — a legal standard used by courts to judge the decisions of governmental agencies, officials and lower courts. Further, he said the plaintiffs were “grasping at straws.”
As a legal issue, both Ogden and Zubi said the case laws sited by the plaintiffs were not applicable to the situation. Based on that alone, Zubi said the case should be dismissed.
Ogden made the case that the plaintiffs are objecting to the Liberty Junction selection because they want to renew their chances of being selected. Speaking of the plaintiffs, he said, “They have zero likelihood of success.” While USPB JV was one of the four finalists for the project, Springfield Tower Square did not make it to that stage. Liberty Junction’s proposal was selected because it was “exceptional,” Ogden said. It was $300 million less expensive than the next-closest proposal and $420 million less than USPB JV, LLC’s proposal. Casting the cost in a different light, Butts said the price tag equaled $1.2 million per year over the course of the 40-year, $2 billion contract.
Beyond the cost, Ogden said, the Liberty Junction team had considerable experience with developing similar large-scale projects. The company is composed of national developers FD Stonewater and CoJo Partners. While FD Stonewater is the sole owner of Liberty Junction, it brought in CoJo Partners as a Massachusetts-based developer with local contacts. Zubi criticized Balise as “someone who sells cars” and does not have construction experience.
Ogden also said the “end user — the Trial Court” preferred Liberty Junction’s proposal, and added, “Trial Court is above the ability to be influenced.”
Butts said the actual end user is the people who will work and do business in the Justice Center. He claimed media reports of courthouse employees being disappointed by the selection. He also said his clients were not seeking the injunction for monetary reasons. “The public interest is served by getting it right,” he said.
Prior to the hearing, state Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell filed a document opposing the injunction on behalf of DCAMM. In it, she made similar assertions about the reason behind the lawsuit. “Plaintiffs have brought this suit because they cannot accept the truth — their proposals do not measure up to the proposal made by… Liberty Junction… and do not provide the best value to the Commonwealth.” She added, “Plaintiffs’ complaint is nothing more than a fever dream of imagined malfeasance in aid of Plaintiffs’ attempt to elevate their own financial interests over the public’s interest.”
Balise and Patel released a statement after the hearing. “This case is about the integrity of the process behind a 40-year, nearly $2 billion project new courthouse. The is meant to be transformative for Springfield and the surrounding region, and to give court employees, visitors and the public the first-class facility they deserve after years of enduring a substandard building,” the statement read.
“That is exactly why it must be awarded through a fair and complete process, one that follows the law, follows the Commonwealth’s own rules and is free of conflicts of interest. Today’s hearing is an important step toward holding the Commonwealth to that standard,” the statement ended. Balise and Patel have also requested that Massachusetts Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro investigate the procurement process and award of the contract.
