The lawyer representing Carletha Cole is also fighting Fla. Gov. Rick Scott’s administration in another lawsuit, this one with himself as the plaintiff. Tallahassee lawyer Steven Andrews is suing for the right to purchase the building that houses his law office. Andrews says Scott and members of the cabinet are trying to buy the building just to spite him.
In March of this year, Scott and other cabinet members voted to purchase an old-house-turned-law-office that sits on one of Tallahassee’s busiest roads. The property is less than a 5-minute walk from the Governor’s Mansion. It’s also adjacent to a historic plantation house called The Grove, where late Fla. Gov. LeRoy Collins lived for two years while the mansion was being built. At the cabinet meeting in March, Sec. of State Ken Detzner said purchasing the property next door to The Grove would provide another public access to what’s being renovated as a museum.
“You can have the greatest piece of property, the greatest gem in the world, but if you don’t have access to it and allow people to get to it safely, then you’ve defeated your purpose and the investment that we already have," he said at the time.
The state was investing almost $600,000 to buy the office building, which was part of the estimated more than $5 million total cost of project to renovate The Grove and surrounding lands and turn the home into a museum. But the state’s plan hit a roadblock when Gov. Scott and other cabinet members were served with a lawsuit by the building’s 20-year tenant, attorney Steven Andrews.
“What we’re doing is trying to buy the building, ultimately," he says.
In his suit--which he filed again on July 25, with new evidence -- Andrews claims he entereed into a contract to purchase the house last October. Since then, he claims, the state has said many times, through various departments and agencies, that it had no intention to buy the property. But Andrews’s partner, Stephen Webster, says the state’s position suddenly changed once the plan reached the governor.
“The Secretary of State, the chief director of the Division of State Lands, all signed off on these documents saying they had no interest in purchasing the properties. And then when it went to the Governor’s office at the end of January, suddenly there was a 180-degree reversal of course," he says.
Webster says, the governor has many reasons to dislike Andrews, one being a 2010 suit the lawyer filed to get then-candidate Scott’s testimony released to the public from an earlier lawsuit against Scott’s urgent care company, Solantic.
“We do believe that the evidence will show that this was a spiteful act," Webster says.
Scott has made statements to the press denying that a personal vendetta factored into the purchase. The documents submitted in the suit include hundreds of e-mails written between various state agencies as they weigh the option of purchasing the office building. In one, dated Jan. 5 of this year, a staff director with the Division of State Lands wrote that the property was not considered conservation land and had no historical significance.
The disputed property belongs to the descendants of former Fla. first lady Mary Call Collins. When her family sold The Grove property to Florida in 1985, their contract said, if the land next door was ever offered for sale, the state would get the right to purchase it at the same price as any competing offer. Andrews had agreed to buy it for $580,000. But, Webster says, his sale couldn’t go through until the state said it didn’t want to purchase it, or after six months, if the state did nothing. The state’s contract for purchase is dated six months and five days after Andrews’s contract.
“So the question of law is, did the state exercise the right of first refusal or did they not?" he says.
He says public records show Gov. Scott is planning to develop the land between his mansion and The Grove as his legacy project, which would commemorate his time in office. During a Senate Conference Committee meeting on March 5, $2.5 million in appropriations for the purchase of “Adjacent Properties and Development” at The Grove was added to another bill. The suit also charges Scott and the rest of the cabinet violated Florida Sunshine Law because, it claims, the appropriations were added to the bill at the last minute without a public meeting on the issue. State Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Office said it was reviewing the new suit but did not return several requests for further comment.