Irvine city consultants understated how much contaminated soil and other environmental waste needed to be hauled away at the Great Park, according to a lawsuit filed by the contractor hired to clean it up.
Resource Environmental Inc. alleges the city also dragged its feet on dozens of change orders needed to finish the job, and internal emails show staff and consultants knew key cleanup and abatement work wasn’t clearly defined in the bid documents — but awarded the contract anyway.
The lawsuit, filed in the Orange County Superior Court on Sept. 24, seeks more than $2 million in damages and alleges there was “materially false information” in the city’s bid documents that REI — and other bidders — relied on when pricing the work.
It targets Griffin Structures, the city’s construction manager on the project, and DMC Engineering, the project engineer, over a major demolition and grading contract at the Cultural Terrace, a section of the Great Park.
REI says the amount of hazardous material listed in the bid documents was “far lower than what was encountered onsite,” and that Griffin “refused to process Resource’s change orders” in a timely fashion, leaving the company with unpaid costs.
REI’s president, Richard Miller, said the company filed more than 70 change orders on the Cultural Terrace project — far above what’s typical. A change order is a standard tool on a public works job used to add or adjust work and price after bidding when conditions differ from what was expected.
Industry data shows the average number of change orders ranges from about two on small public construction projects to roughly 11 on larger ones, according to an analysis by AIA Contract Documents.
“This volume was unprecedented in our experience and raised several red flags,” Miller said.
The city of Irvine and Griffin Structures declined to answer detailed questions, citing the pending case. Neither addressed whether the bid documents reflected all known site conditions at the time of bidding. DMC Engineering did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
What REI says it found
The Cultural Terrace bid, awarded March 26, 2024, had 29 cubic yards of hydrocarbon contaminated soil for excavation and disposal, according to the city’s bid documents. But REI says its crews ended up digging out 5,612 cubic yards and hauling off 8,319 tons of that material — roughly 361 truckloads, compared to just one truckload projected in the bid documents.
Similar gaps showed up elsewhere. The bid documents said the contractor should transport and dispose of 82 tons of lead contaminated soil, but REI says its workers actually hauled 515 tons.
Miller said other waste quantities similarly ballooned in the field.
“I’ve been doing this 42 years now. I’ve had two jobs in my whole life, so it’s the only thing I’ve ever done. So I’ve seen a lot and I know a lot,” Miller said, “and I’ve never seen something like this. It is an insane change order. It’s an insane amount of work.”
That kind of gap, Miller said, translated into months of extra work and millions of dollars in added costs that REI had no choice but to absorb, costs it now wants the city to cover.
The job on the Cultural Terrace was awarded at $4.9 million, according to official documents. But Miller said it cost double the original bid to get the job done, bringing the final price tag close to $10 million.
When asked why REI raised concerns only near the end of the Cultural Terrace project and not earlier, Miller said the crew’s priority was meeting the city’s deadlines.
“They have to get the job done because there’s liquidated damages if you don’t finish by ‘x’ time. These were extremely high liquidated damages. So the workers’ focus was to get the job done,” he said. “That’s where I take full blame for how we did not know that this went over to this extent. But what happens, in their defense, is you’re doing the work, and you don’t know the amount until you’re done.”
Did the city of Irvine know?
A review of internal emails shows that on the day bids for the Cultural Terrace project were due — and in the days that followed — Irvine city staff and consultants acknowledged that key cleanup and abatement work wasn’t clearly spelled out in the bid documents. The messages suggest they focused more on whether the city had legal cover if a contractor challenged the omissions later.
Messages from March 15-18, 2024, show staff and consultants identified two oversights in the final bid package: the omission of language specifying remediation of underground steam lines, and the failure to include hazardous materials removal for Buildings 96 and 388.
A consultant with Griffin Structures noted that an earlier version of the bid documents explicitly stated the steam pipe removal included remediation, but that language was missing from the final bid. He flagged this as “an item of concern,” especially given how low the winning bid came in for that line item.
“So somewhere in the final few days ‘INCLUDING REMEDIATION’ got removed either by mistake or purposefully??? Maybe to be included in another bid item? Even if by mistake, then I think we are still okay,” replied another consultant working with the city, pointing to vague references in the specs that might still cover the work.
A few days later, that same consultant noted that the city could face “exposure for a construction change order” due to the omission of Buildings 96 and 388 from one of the line items, even though hazmat reports had shown those buildings contained contamination. He described their “fallback” as the fact that the hazmat reports were included elsewhere in the specifications, even though the actual bid form, which contractors use to price their work, didn’t list those buildings.
He acknowledged that “bid items take precedent over specifications.”
“I believe that the contractor could argue that those reports were for reference only and removal of hazardous materials from those 2 TVI buildings is not a part of their bid,” he wrote, asking colleagues if there was “any location that we can fall back on that will cover the city in this regard?”
He also suggested removing the item from the contractor’s work entirely and hiring “someone else if this becomes an issue,” instead of facing “a potential change order.”
The issue came up again months later. In an October 2024 email, the same consultant confirmed that a drawing identifying hazardous materials in Buildings 96 and 388 “was never made a part of the bid documents.”
The Cultural Terrace sits on land once used as Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. After the base closed, the United States Navy investigated and cleaned up contamination under federal base‑closure rules.
The site is currently under state oversight. In an agreement executed with the Department of Toxic Substances Control in July, the city agreed to investigate and, if needed, remediate “a release, a threatened release, or a potential release of any hazardous substance” at the Cultural Terrace property.
DTSC lists petroleum, PFAS, VOCs and lead as substances that are “or may be” present “as a result of the US Navy use of the site as a former military base.”
Miller alleges the city never informed REI of the agreement.
City spokesperson Kristina Perrigoue declined to answer questions about the pending case, including whether Irvine had prior knowledge about contamination levels at the site or believes its bid documents accurately reflected known conditions. She said that, to her knowledge, no other legal actions related to demolition or environmental cleanup at the Great Park have been filed against the city or its consultants.
While Perrigoue said there haven’t been “any other lawsuits against the city by any other party related to environmental conditions at the Great Park,” the city has faced other disputes over unexpected site conditions. In 2024, Irvine paid $4.2 million to settle a dispute with Beador Construction over the expansion of University Drive near UC Irvine.
According to the law firm representing Beador Construction, the project was delayed nearly two years due to unforeseen underground conditions, errors in the city’s documents and delays by the local utility in removing power lines and light poles.
The city allegedly accused the contractor of subpar work and demanded more than $1 million in penalties, but the judge ruled that Beador had met its contractual obligations and that the delays were not the company’s fault.
In a separate job at the Northern Sector of the Great Park, Miller said the city’s bid documents listed about 1,264 linear feet of asbestos‑cement pipe for removal. Once work began, an environmental report conducted by the city identified about 18,000 linear feet of asbestos-cement pipe across the site, he said.
“Field conditions are consistent with that representation — we are routinely encountering ACP across the site, including in areas that were not labeled as such in the bid set,” Miller wrote in an Aug. 4 email to several top Irvine officials, including Great Park Manager Brian Polivka, City Manager Sean Crumby and Great Park Director Luis Estevez.
“Additionally, the Procedure 5 Plan itself — which governs abatement methods — was not included in the bid documents, nor even referenced. It was issued post-award and has now substantially altered our means,” Miller wrote. “The project now requires significant safety planning, waste handling, and regulatory oversight not priced into our bid … just as occurred on prior city projects like Cultural Terrace.”
The city ended REI’s contract “for convenience” in August, which allows an agency to cancel work without assigning blame and typically limits what a contractor can recover. Miller said that happened shortly after he threatened to air his concerns at a City Council meeting.
The Northern Sector job isn’t part of the lawsuit, and Miller said REI plans to pursue the Northern Sector dispute separately.
