The state agency overseeing the $2B Springfield courthouse lease created nearly 4000 public records between itself and the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, led by interim executive director John Barros, in the eighteen months leading up to the conditional award of the troubled justice center contract.

The vast volume of documents indicate a potential appearance of conflict for Barros that could be difficult to retroactively erase and a deep interagency relationship between the awarding agency, the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, and the Convention Center Authority.

Additionally, Secretary of Administration and Finance Matt Gorzkowicz serves as Treasurer Convention Center Authority and sits on the MCCA board, while the DCAMM reports to Gorzkowicz in his role as A&F Secretary.

Yesterday, Barros, officially divested from Cojo Real Estate LLC, a company he formed with Conan Harris, which was part of the Liberty Junction consortium that won the sought after 40 year Springfield lease. Harris is the husband of Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

Also Thursday, the Chief Medical Examiner ruled that the death of 18 year Laini Marte earlier this month, in a rental home owned by Harris, was a homicide. Harris previously spent ten years in jail for drug trafficking.

Two other contenders to replace the existing 1971 brutalist facility, Springfield businessmen Jeb Balise and Dinesh Patel, have filed suit contesting the DCAMM conditional determination issued a month ago.

Balise and Patel contend in court documents that Barros neglected to disclose his ownership stake in Cojo Real Estate when he filed a March 2026 Statement of Financial Interest with the State Ethics Commission and did not notify the Commission of his ownership until the day after DCAMM awarded the bid to Liberty Junction, which includes Cojo, Suffolk Construction and Stonewater, a Virginia-based company.

Lawyers for Balise and Patel wrote in a supplemental restraining order motion filed Thursday, “the notion that Liberty Junction could somehow cure that conflict of interest after DCAMM selected their proposal is fanciful—an ex post disclosure obviously could not erase the indelible taint of a sitting high-level state official serving as one of the named principals.”

In preparation for the legal challenge, attorneys for the plaintiffs filed a public records request with the DCAMM seeking “correspondence between DCAMM and MCCA” for the eighteen months leading up to the announcement of conditional determination.

According to court documents filed yesterday by the plaintiffs:

“In a July 20, 2026, response to Plaintiffs’ recent public records request, the MCCA reported that a search of correspondence between DCAMM and MCCA for the period January 1, 2025, through July 2, 2026, identified approximately 4,000 responsive documents—an average of roughly ten documents every business day over that eighteen-month span. That volume of contact between the contracting agency (DCAMM) and the agency led by a named principal of the winning bid (the MCCA), during the very period that the proposals were under evaluation, underscores the appearance of impropriety that Section 23(b)(3) is designed to prevent.”