The Broward School Board has agreed to spend about $270,000 to settle a lawsuit over a canceled office lease that became a symbol of wasteful spending.
Including rental payments the district had previously made, the lease with the nonprofit group Handy is expected to cost the school district a total of $545,000, even though district staff never actually moved into the building, officials said.
“We got zero days of occupancy for half a million dollars,” Board member Allen Zeman said during a meeting Tuesday, where the settlement was approved.
Handy, which stands for Helping Advance and Nurture the Development of Youth, filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the school district in early December, alleging breach of contract and damage to Handy’s reputation.
Neither Handy’s lawyer, Thomas Sternberg, nor Handy CEO Kirk Brown could be reached, despite attempts by phone and email.
The School Board agreed in June to rent space in Handy’s newly acquired headquarters in Wilton Manors to house district facilities staff who had been working inside a district building that was being sold.
But the office space proved to be small for the district and had too few parking spaces for the number of employees it was intended to house, emails showed. The district spent about $88,000 in technology upgrades, which also delayed employees moving in, officials said.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel published a news article in October, calling attention to the district’s five-year, $2.6 million contract for the Handy site, when the district was facing about $100 million in budget cuts and had plenty of vacant space at half-empty schools.
Board members told the Sun Sentinel the arrangement didn’t make sense and they voted to terminate the lease on Nov. 4. The School Board used a provision in the lease that allows termination if the district fails to allocate the money on an annual basis. Although the money had already been previously allocated, the board action on Nov. 4 rescinded that allocation.
Under the agreement, the district will pay $228,000 now and about $14,000 a month in April, May and June. The monthly payments will stop if Handy finds a replacement tenant or sells the property, the settlement states.
Board member Adam Cervera, who is a lawyer, said he believed the district had a lawful right to terminate and told board members on Tuesday that he opposed the settlement.
“I am against this,” Cervera told board members. “I think this is an asinine amount of money that we are paying these folks on a contract that we properly terminated.”
But Kathelyn Jacques-Adams, the district’s interim general counsel, told board members she had been given direction by the board in closed-door session to try to settle.
“With any lawsuit that is filed, there is uncertainty,” Jacques-Adams said. “You may have a winning case and lose. You may have a losing case and win. Literally, it’s up to the judge or up to the jury with regards to whether we’re going to win or lose. And so, as a result of that uncertainty, our instructions were to settle, and we settled successfully.”
Other board members said they didn’t want to spend attorney’s fees trying to fight the case.
“I think that in this particular situation, this is a self-inflicted wound,” said board member Maura Bulman, who is also a lawyer. “This is something that we should not have been signing in the first place, and we made a mistake.”