BY GREGORY A. HALL and JANE PRENDERGAST
The Cincinnati Enquirer
COVINGTON -- Corporex Companies Inc. Chairman Bill Butler may have had more information than previously thought about competitors seeking to build a $35.6 million parking garage and courthouse for Kenton County.
Details came from a 20-page analysis written and released by Mr. Butler during his deposition in a lawsuit Wednesday.
During almost seven hours of testimony, Mr. Butler got a long-awaited second chance to present his views on details behind an $850,000 lawsuit against him and his company.
The lawsuit by Kenton County hinges on whether the developer had an unfair advantage over competitors in the bidding for courthouse and parking garage construction contracts. Mr. Butler said his analysis was to document why his company offered the lowest and best bid.
Mr. Butler said the document "simply extols the merits of our proposal."
"It's a compiling of information Bill got from a lot of different sources," Corporex attorney Mark Hayden said later Wednesday. The county is suing Mr. Butler and Corporex to recover an $850,000 settlement paid to the two losing bidders in the bidding controversy over the parking garage and courthouse.
The county paid Wessels Construction and Development Corp. and Carroll Properties after the companies filed a lawsuit alleging Corporex had an unfair advantage in the bidding.
The county blames Mr. Butler's actions during the entire bidding process.
"Corporex gained no unfair advantage at any point in time," Mr. Butler testified.
He said his analysis was put together over a six-week period. He said he started it April 11, 1996, and revised it twice -- both times before the May 23 selection of Corporex by the county.
He was able to see his competitors' proposals, before they got to see his, during a one-hour private meeting at the home of former Judge-executive Clyde Middleton on April 2, 1996, the night bids were opened.
Mr. Butler said he spent about an hour -- "considerable time" -- at Mr. Middleton's house, at a desk in his living room. He said he took two to four pages of notes -- "I took a lot of information down." In his first deposition Dec. 2, 1997, Mr. Butler said he wasn't sure if he had taken notes.
"I may have," he said then. "I recognized immediately what the bids were, what the actual amounts were."
County officials say the 20-page analysis couldn't have come from a one-hour review of the proposals.
"To me it means that he not only took a peek on April 2nd in the judge's home, but he also got a full copy of his competitors' proposals at some point in time," Kenton County Attorney Garry Edmondson said.
Mr. Butler was able to use that analysis in revising prices and answering questions from the county about his bid, Mr. Edmondson said. His competitors did not have similar access to his bidding information.
Mr. Butler said he showed the analysis to two members of the fiscal court, Mr. Middleton and Commissioner Bernie Moorman.
The meeting with Mr. Moorman took place April 10, 1996.
The county's Deputy Judge-executive, George Neack, testified last week that Mr. Butler may have had a competitive advantage based on the extended analysis. Previously, he had said Mr. Butler hadn't gotten a competitive edge from the meeting with Mr. Middleton. "There's no way . . . that a 15-page document could have been drafted after a meeting of one hour because it was an absolute spread of all three bids," Mr. Neack said May 14. "And so my opinion has been tempered somewhat drastically."
Mr. Neack has testified that investigators for the state attorney general, who are investigating the bidding scandal, have questioned him about the analysis.
Mr. Butler said Mr. Neack was biased against Corporex. Mr. Neack has denied that and says he ultimately favored Corporex's bid. The analysis involves two parts. The first is a 16-page comparison of Corporex's and Wessels' bids. In it, Mr. Butler covers different alternatives and their costs. The other is a four-page comparison of all three proposals.
Mr. Butler said the analysis came from the meeting at Mr. Middleton's home, information released by the county, and guesswork.
"It's too close," Mr. Edmondson said. "It's not guesswork." Losing developers have objected to work done by Corporex before the projects were ever opened to competition.
Mr. Butler said his firm's work in helping the county write bid specifications for a courthouse and parking garage made it easier for competitors' to improve on those ideas, he said during a deposition for the lawsuit by the county against him and his company.
"We set ourselves up for disadvantage," he said.
One of the financial details remained under wraps Wednesday. Mr. Hayden objected to Mr. Edmondson asking how much profit the company is making on the courthouse and parking garage projects. Mr. Hayden refused to let Mr. Butler answer.
A day earlier, an executive for one of the losing bidders, Carroll Vice President Mark Simendinger, said his company expected to make $800,000 on the two projects.
