The city's development arm announced Thursday it will cancel a $1.5 million contract to demolish eight downtown buildings at Calvert and Lombard streets, the second planned demolition to be halted since The Baltimore Sun reported that the agency was not following the city's open-bidding rules.
"We're not planning to do any future demolition at this time," said Baltimore Development Corp. President M.J. "Jay" Brodie. "We are not going to follow this approach of BDC soliciting work."
The Baltimore Sun reported Monday that the agency had awarded a $378,477 demolition contract at the proposed site of a slots casino after soliciting prices from a handful of firms rather than advertising the work publicly. Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon announced Tuesday that BDC would no longer award demolition contracts.
The contract to raze the downtown buildings to clear land for the planned $80 million City Center project, which will include two hotels and retail space, had been awarded several months ago to the Berg Corp., Brodie said. The company has already hung its purple banner on a towering former USF&G building slated to be knocked down. Workers with the firm are tearing out interior wiring and debris from one building as part of the environmental remediation for the project; that will continue for the next two to three weeks, Brodie said.
The city's charter requires any contract over $25,000 to be advertised. But for the past year, Brodie said, his agency has been soliciting city demolition companies to tear down buildings at sites where developments were planned because BDC anticipated very little construction because of the tight credit markets.
"We thought acquisition, relocation and demolition would advance sites," Brodie said. "We would prepare the grounds."
Brodie said he consulted with some of his BDC colleagues who believed that the quasi-governmental agency had the authority to go outside the regular city bidding process with demolition contracts, as it does for other types of contracts. "I didn't question that," he said. "I don't know to what degree they checked."
BDC can award consulting and other third-party contracts without using city guidelines, but those contracts tend to be much smaller than those for demolition, although at times they do exceed the city's $25,000 limit.
The demolition work, however, is viewed as "public works" and not "third-party consulting" and therefore does not fall within BDC's ability to go outside the charter, Brodie said.
