Indianapolis Board Regroups after Losing Construction Suit
A jury rejected claims by the Indianapolis–Marion County Public Library that an engineering firm was responsible for $24.5 million in damages caused by defects in the concrete beams of an underground parking garage in its renovated downtown central library. The problems halted construction of the project and added $50 million to the eventual $150-million cost of the project, which opened last December, two years behind schedule.
In the five-week trial, the library argued that Thornton Tomasetti concealed flaws in its design; the New York–based firm blamed construction companies for failing to carry the plans out properly. The jury’s April 15 verdict found that the firm did not commit fraud, and ruled that the library must pay Thornton Tomasetti $712,000 in unpaid fees, the Indianapolis Star reported April 16.
The library board said in an April 15 statement that it was “disappointed with the verdict. We continued to seek legal redress because we believed in the validity of our claim that there were issues with Thornton Tomasetti’s work, and that we would have been remiss in our responsibility to Marion County taxpayers if we had not pursued legal remedies in this case.” Although no mention of an appeal was made in the statement, trustees have not ruled out the possibility. “We have not had a chance to digest what has just been relayed to us this evening,” board President Jesse B. Lynch said at an April 16 meeting after a closed-door session with library attorneys, according to the April 17 Star.
In its own statement, reported April 16 by Indianapolis television station WTHR, Thornton Tomasetti said, “The Library Board owes the taxpayers of Indianapolis and Marion County some honest answers—specifically why nearly $60 million of their tax dollars was spent on a garage that cost $7 million to build . . . . Since the legal and engineering fees to ‘investigate, repair, and litigate’ the garage totaled three times the original construction cost, the question taxpayers should be asking is, ‘exactly whose interests where served by this process?’”
The library had previously recovered some half of the project’s cost overruns through settlements with other companies totaling over $25 million, including $21.5 million in payments, the Star reported.
Posted on April 24, 2009.