Green Cove Springs votes to settle with pool contractor

The city council voted to offer CORE Construction $25,000 to settle a lawsuit surrounding the construction of the city’s pool at Spring Park.

Green Cove Springs hired the Jacksonville contractor in March 2016 to build the $2.2 million facility. Six months later, the city threatened to declare CORE in default, claiming the contractor failed to properly man and supervise the job, failed to pay subcontractors, performed substandard work and failed to make adequate progress on the project.

The contractor blamed the lack of progress on the pool on the city’s failure to provide finalized construction plans and “the deficient and extremely slow site work that was being self-performed by the city public works department.”

The contractor claimed that after a certificate of occupancy was issued for the facility in October 2017, the city withheld the final payment to the contractor.

CORE sued the city, claiming breach of contract, unjust enrichment, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing and violation of the Local Government Prompt Payment Act.

The city countersued, claiming the contractor misled officials on the status and progress of the job and restating its earlier claims of insufficient supervision, substandard work and failure to timely pay subcontractors.

City Attorney L.J. Arnold III told the city council during its Nov. 1 meeting that the municipality has spent $95,000 in attorney’s fees and other costs related to the lawsuit.

He also said that after mediation failed and other attempts to resolve the litigation faltered, the principal of the construction company died, and progress on the lawsuit ground to a halt.

Arnold said the plaintiff recently offered to settle the litigation with the city paying $30,000. He recommended the city make a counteroffer of $25,000.

“I think for $25,000 you can make this go away,” Arnold told council members, “close the books on it, and that’s my recommendation.”

City Manager Steve Kennedy called the settlement decision a “no-brainer.”

“From a fiscal standpoint,” he told council members, “we’ll pay them out of money we would have already normally paid them if they had fulfilled all their obligations, and we had fulfilled our obligations, so we’re pretty much paying them out of their own money, in reality.”