SSomething strange happened late last year in a federal court in Chicago that will be discussed again in this same court on January 23rd.
Boldt Cos. and Black & Veatch had sued in 2019 for breach of contract over the former’s termination, a key subcontractor, on a large onshore wind project in Illinois. Each side said the other owed them a lot of money.
Both companies asked Judge Andrea Wood to rule on the matter before a jury trial, and in March 2023 she ruled in favor of Black & Veatch. All that remained for a trial was for jurors to decide how much Boldt owed Black & Veatch.
After a four-day trial that ended last November, the jury awarded Black & Veatch one dollar.
That has sent the already five-year-old lawsuit over the 150MW Cardinal Point wind farm into the court equivalent of additional fees, but not for the usual reason of an appeal based on an error of judgment. The jurors seemed to be casting a shadow over Judge Wood’s view that Black & Veatch was right.
In a response to one of several recent motions, he said that now “the parties have a dispute about themselves [Black & Veatch] is properly considered a dominant party.”
Wood’s summary judgment, combined with the jury’s $1 verdict, essentially left Boldt’s original claim for damages against Black & Veatch stranded in what one attorney described as a legal “no man’s land.”
To keep his claim alive, Boldt filed a new lawsuit in April for $6 million ($5 million in costs and $1 million in interest) that the contractor claims he is owed. The parties are meeting again with Wood on Jan. 23 to try to patch things up.
Neither Boldt nor Black & Veatch would comment on the ongoing litigation.
Nominal damages, which is how lawyers describe an award of $1, are sometimes requested by plaintiffs in various types of lawsuits as tokens of a decision in their favor when no actual monetary damages are sought.writes attorney Lesley Folk on the website LegalMatch. Nominal damages, he writes, can “prove that the plaintiff had a legal right to bring the suit” or that “the defendant’s conduct was wrongful.”
But they are”especially rare in contract cases,” Folk continued, “because most claims for breach of contract generally involve some monetary economic loss to the plaintiff.”
Prior to the jury’s damage award, the trial looked like a clear victory for Black & Veatch through Wood’s summary judgment.
Capital Power, an Edmonton, Alberta-based wind energy developer, had hired Black & Veatch in a $68 million contract to build 60 General Electric wind turbines on a 20,000-acre site in Good Hope, Illinois. Black & Veatch, in turn, hired Appleton. Wisconsin-based Boldt Cos. to erect the turbines, each generating 2.5 MW, at a cost of $15 million. subcontract
A dispute over the Cardinal Point project drags on. Photo: Keith Turrill/Alamy
.The accusations and counter-accusations give some idea of the difficulties experienced by the companies in the field and among themselves.
According to Boldt, their work was delayed due to Black & Veatch’s failure to provide adequate crane pads, access roads and site settlement areas. Those responsibilities were “consistent with [Black & Veatch’s] obligations under the contract,” Wood wrote. Boldt also blamed GE’s delayed and incomplete deliveries of turbine parts for the remainder of the delay.
Boldt stated which had erected or partly erected many of the turbines but which Black & Veatch never paid him for the work covered by a final invoice.
Black & Veatch claimed, however, that Boldt was the sole cause of the project’s delay. He said that he had to incur considerable expense to rush to finish the work on time.
In its initial response to Boldt’s complaint, Black & Veatch denied that Boldt had fully erected even a single wind turbine. He said the preparation of the erection sites for each turbine was done according to plans shared with Boldt. Black & Veatch disputed Boldt’s contention that Black & Veatch was “required to set up crane jobs and bearings and coordinate equipment deliveries so that equipment parts would arrive” under the
[crane] hook”, within the working radius of Boldt cranes.
Black & Veatch admitted that some components arrived late and were out of order.
But he denied that there were soft ground conditions at the crane bearings, that foundation fill practices were inadequate and that the crane bearings were weakened. While about half of the bearings were installed over backfill areas, “the tower foundations were properly backfilled and compacted and each compacted lift was tested for load capacity prior to backfilling,” he said. say Black & Veatch.
Black & Veatch seemed to win
In April 2023, shortly after Judge Wood’s summary judgment ruling in Black & Veatch’s favor, it appeared the Overland Park, Kan.-based firm would likely win substantial compensation for its additional costs.
The apparent victory was based on the details of the contract.
In granting summary judgment to Black & Veatch, Wood found that Boldt had failed to follow the delay procedures specified in its contract with Black & Veatch. That company had followed contractual guidelines, he said.
Boldt’s subcontract required it to provide an initial notice within five days of learning of a delay event and a second notice within 20 days of notice of an “actual and demonstrable delay,” he noted. John Mark Goodman, an attorney at the Bradley Law Firm who commented on the case at the time.
“While Boldt provided the initial five-day notice, he did not provide the second, more detailed 20-day notice” to obtain cost and scheduling relief, Goodman noted. “Instead, the court found that Black & Veatch gave adequate notice of breach” and fully complied with the termination procedures for cause of the contract,” he wrote.
At the time, Black & Veatch’s claim was headed for trial in which a jury could have, based on its view of the evidence, ordered Boldt to pay multimillion-dollar damages.
