On Thursday, Suffolk Construction’s general counsel Jay Tangney sent a six-page letter to Monica Tibbits-Nutt, the state’s transportation secretary, urging her to start a new bid process for the plaza project instead of simply picking Global for the job. Tangney’s letter took aim at claims Global made in press statements and in court filings that the process was tainted by friendly relationships between Suffolk and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.
Among the accusations in a lawsuit Global had filed to overturn Applegreen’s lease were that Suffolk executives were texting MassDOT official Scott Bosworth as he and others at MassDOT considered the competing service-plaza bids.
Tangney, in his letter on Thursday, attached signed affidavits from Suffolk chief executive John Fish and two of his lieutenants. Essentially, those affidavits say that nearly all the texts were related to either a major construction project at South Station, in which Suffolk has been the general contractor, or a tragic situation in Bosworth’s family. There was some conversation about a bridge issue in Barnstable’s swanky Oyster Harbors community. Only a few texts referred to the service plaza issue, the Suffolk executives said, and they occurred after a MassDOT committee picked the Applegreen bid on June 11.
Suffolk also filed a lengthy public records request with MassDOT on Tuesday, seeking all communications pertaining to Global Partners and its role in the service plaza fight, including conditions at existing locations that could be attributable to Global. The Waltham company runs four plazas outright, and provides fuel and convenience store services at the 11 along the Mass. Turnpike as a subtenant. The request follows Global’s own public records requests of MassDOT, including one that unearthed the text messages in question.
MassDOT now has to decide whether to go with Global or rebid the entire project, a process that could take a year or more.
In his letter, Tangney argued for the latter course of action. He cited key “deficiencies” that plagued Global’s bid, including its lack of experience with this kind of construction project and its limited EV charging plans.
He advised Tibbits-Nutt against picking Global at this point, just to advance the project more quickly, because it could encourage or reward “the kind of manipulative misinformation campaign waged by Global over the past several weeks” and thus undermine future MassDOT procurements, in part by discouraging bidders from engaging.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.
