A Baltimore judge has ruled that a lawsuit challenging the award of contracts to build State Center in midtown Baltimore will go forward, stopping construction of the $1.5 billion project until it is resolved.
At the same time, authors of a report from the Maryland Public Policy Institute that found taxpayers will pay $127 million for the public-private State Center redevelopment project are trading barbs with state officials about the report’s accuracy.
The day after the report was published last week, Department of General Services Assistant Secretary for Real Estate Michael Gaines and Department of Transportation State Center Project Director Christopher Patusky wrote a letter to Maryland Public Policy Institute President Christopher Summers, asking him to withdraw the report. Gaines and Patusky wrote that the report contained “serious misstatements of fact.”
“It is difficult for us to understand how an organization could seek to produce a credible report on this project without either contacting the state government or the private development team to verify its information,” the letter states. The letter goes on to refute several facts presented in the study.
Summers said that the institute was “absolutely not” going to rescind the report, and that nobody else had ever asked the institute to do such a thing.
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