QuoteOwner of city-backed parking garages sues city, saying DIA is breaching its contract
After months of back and forth between the Downtown Investment Authority and the owner of three city-funded parking garages, the dispute is being taken to the courtroom.
Metropolitan Parking Solutions, which owns the Courthouse, Sports Complex and Arena garages, has filed suit against DIA, alleging both a breach of contract and a breach of good faith and fair dealing.
The lawsuit comes after DIA withheld money it owed MPS, saying MPS had breached contract by failing to meet financial reporting requirements stipulated in its contract with the city. A Council Auditor's Office report published last year exposed financial reporting errors on the part of MPS and lax oversight on the part of DIA.
But Brenna Manna Diamond managing partner Matthew T. Jackson, said the city is trying to change the rules of the game.
"Since the inception of the agreement governing the development and operation of the garages, MPS has always had an amicable working relationship with the various entities who have managed the contract from the City side," Jackson wrote in an email to the Business Journal. "Unfortunately, DIA has recently disregarded this relationship and course of conduct between the parties over the course of the last 16 years and, for the first time, is demanding information that is both not material, has never been required and irrelevant to the agreement between the Parties."
Full article: https://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2020/09/10/mps-sues-dia.html?cx_testId=6&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s
LOL...that last paragraph sounds like they're upset that, for the first time in their 16 year history, they are being held to the contract.
Do any lawyers know of some law/ruling that makes a contract null and void if one of the parties hadn't been enforcing clauses for decades and then suddenly begins enforcing them?
Seems like a waste of time and money on MPS's part.
It's so silly that one of our biggest downtown expenditures is paying MPS for garages that we would have been better off running ourselves or just never building in the first place. Just imagine what these millions spend annually could have help paid for the last two decades.
Considering how bad the contracts the city has been involved with have been over the years, this is not likely to end well for COJ.