A controversial and long-stalled apartment project in Pittsford that has plodded on through 15 years of civic battles and a conveyor belt of litigation is the subject of yet another lawsuit.
The project’s developer, Mark IV Enterprises subsidiary Pittsford Canalside Properties, is suing Monroe County’s economic development agency over its decision in May to deny the project, known as Westport Crossing, more than $7 million in tax breaks.
Board members of the agency, COMIDA, were split on the decision. The final vote was 4 to 3.
“We will not be building this project without this support,” Steve DiMarzo, a managing partner for Mark IV, said to the board immediately after the vote.
Westport Crossing, in its current iteration, would include 156 apartments across seven buildings on an almost 8-acre site along the Erie Canal at the village’s edge. The site was formerly home to an asphalt plant and Pittsford Canalside Properties has spent more than $5 million cleaning up pollution at the site.
The developer submitted its first permit applications to the village of Pittsford in 2009 and for most of the years since, the project has been mired in a regulatory and legal mess. The village has spent more than $1 million defending itself in more than a dozen lawsuits and countersuits around the proposed project.
The new lawsuit is at least the 14th involving the project.
But Pittsford Canalside Properties now has most of the necessary approvals in hand and is pursuing its building permit.
In April, Pittsford Canalside Properties applied for a 10-year property tax break as well as exemptions from sales and mortgage reporting taxes. It claimed that the Westport Crossing project would create 120 temporary construction jobs and at least 24 full-time jobs.
In the complaint, filed Monday in state Supreme Court, the developer argues that COMIDA board member Joseph Alloco ran afoul of the agency's conflict of interest policy by neglecting to recuse himself from voting on the project and discussing it with other board members. Alloco is the president of Alloco Real Estate, a company that owns five residential rental properties within 6 miles of the Westport Crossing site.
“The policy requires board members to recuse or abstain from any decision where a conflict of interest exists,” the complaint reads.
The lawsuit alleges that Alloco, who voted against the developer’s application, had both real and perceived conflicts and that he attempted to influence other board members. It asks the court to order COMIDA to reconsider the application without the participation of Alloco or any board member with whom he discussed the matter.
The lawsuit alleges that the board did not make “findings of fact” explaining why it denied the application, and that COMIDA Executive Director Ana Liss told the developer that the four board members voted against the tax incentives because they believed the DiMarzo family, which owns Mark IV Enterprises, didn’t need the money.
But Liss said that's not what she told the developer.
"In a follow-up phone conversation with the developer, I specifically said that when members of the COMIDA Board of Directors, who are independently appointed to these positions by the president of the Monroe County Legislature, vote against a project, it may be because they do not agree that the project should be eligible for tax incentives," she wrote in an email to WXXI.
The petition argues in part that the application’s denial resulted from “improper consideration of the financial condition of the DiMarzo family.”
A message left Tuesday for Alloco was not immediately returned.
