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Ric Stott
Southampton Village will pay $75,000 to settle a lawsuit with a local architect who designed a new village ambulance headquarters — a design that was redone after it came in over budget and was ultimately abandoned in favor of a pre-engineered building.
The Village Board voted unanimously during a special meeting on Tuesday, August 3, to authorize Mayor Jesse Warren to sign a stipulation of settlement with Ric Stott of Stott Architecture P.C. Mr. Stott, whose firm received nearly $396,985 from the village, sued in December 2017 for $185,009 that he said he was still owed.
Village voters approved a $5.5 million bond for a new ambulance headquarters on Windmill Lane in 2014, and the Village Planning Board approved the plans for the structure in October 2016. However, the construction bids came in $1.6 million over budget. The Village Board went on to approve a pre-engineered structure, and ground was broken in November 2018.
At the time that the lawsuit was filed, then-Mayor Michael Irving told The Southampton Press that the village had paid Mr. Stott per the contract. “Any dispute involves extras that were not part of the contract and were never approved,” he said.
Southampton Village Attorney Ken Gray said during the Village Board’s August 3 meeting that the lawsuit concerned both full payment of the contract and a number of “change-work orders.” He explained that the settlement agreement was struck after a recent mediation conference and avoids the cost of litigation.
“This settlement is within the range that this board had indicated it would be comfortable with settling,” Mr. Gray said. “It ends the litigation, it saves the village the cost of a trial and possible appeals, and it is way below what the demand was from the plaintiff.”
Prior to the Village Board members unanimously voting in favor of the settlement, Mr. Warren emphasized that the lawsuit pre-dates all of their tenures. “No members of this board were present during this work so this is something that this board inherited,” he said. “I would just like to thank Mr. Stott for his work and put on the public record that myself, as well as this board, largely has a commitment to reducing the village’s long-term liabilities, efficient government and to eliminating waste. And we’re happy to turn the page on this one and move forward and move on with a brighter chapter, and also try to create a better environment where we have a nice relationship working with our vendors and contractors and other outside agents.”
Village Board member Roy Stevenson said the village could have paid substantially more than the negotiated settlement amount if the case was brought to trial, between the legal fees and the risk of the court finding in Mr. Stott’s favor at a higher amount. “While no one enjoys having to pay funds for items that we were not responsible for, I feel this is the best solution to a problem that we inherited,” he said.
Mark Epley, who was the mayor when the Village Board enlisted Mr. Stott to design the new ambulance headquarters, was critical of the settlement. “The village settled a lawsuit without speaking with me, Michael Irving, [former Village Administrator] Steve Funsch, the construction manager, any of the former lawyers for the village or any member of the ambulance building committee,” he said. “They had no information about the process or the history of the project. No one involved would have settled this.”
Mr. Stott said the taxpayers are the losers in the situation because “they got a building that is far inferior to the one that I designed.” He noted that his design was Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified.
“It came in over budget,” he said. “Instead of choosing a redesigned building that I did for them for no cost whatsoever, they chose instead to use a pre-engineered building that will last half the time of the building that I designed and will cost taxpayers more every day to operate.” He later added, “And it’s ugly, in my opinion, too.”
Ms. Stott said his lawsuit was for the balance of his contract with the village — what he was owed for completing the bidding phase and what he would have been paid for overseeing the construction phase — and for his work on a number of changes that the Southampton Village Volunteer Ambulance had asked him for.
He acknowledged that the changes were not in the contract and that the contract stated that he would not be paid for additional services unless there was written prior approval. However, he said the village agreed to pay his consultants and engineers for their part in those additional services while not paying him.
“I was willing to eat all of those things, basically, until I got an invoice from my consultants for $39,000,” he said.
Mr. Stott said the reason this original building came in over budget was because the bidding process was delayed for a year. He faulted the village for the delay and said it resulted in increased construction costs.
Mr. Epley said the delay was due to neighbors suing to fight the new building, and he did not agree that it could have resulted in costs going up by more than $1 million. The building came in over budget because it included a special roof, curved glass, circular stairs, a solar hot water roof system, and other expensive things, according to Mr. Epley. He also did not believe that Mr. Stott’s redesigned building would have come in within the budget and said the redesign would have cut a third of the size.
For his part, Mr. Stott said he asked two contractors to assess his design and they agreed it could have been constructed at the $5.5 million budget number.
He noted that he had also designed the village’s police headquarters on Windmill Lane and that the ambulance project was important to his career, resume and portfolio as well as to him personally. “I invested years of time into that project,” he said. “It’s my community.”
