10/20/2025
Great Park Cleanup Lawsuit Exposes Oliver Chi’s Mismanagement and Rush to “Show Progress”
A new lawsuit over the Great Park cleanup project highlights a pattern of haste and poor judgment by former Irvine City Manager Oliver Chi, whose push to demonstrate rapid progress appears to have overridden basic due diligence and risk management.
A Costly Oversight at the Cultural Terrace
According to the lawsuit filed September 24 in Orange County Superior Court, the City of Irvine and its consultants severely understated the volume of contaminated soil and hazardous waste that needed to be removed from the Great Park’s Cultural Terrace area — a key project initiated under Chi’s leadership. The contractor, Resource Environmental Inc. (REI), alleges it was misled by materially false information in the city’s bid documents and left holding millions in unpaid costs after the true scope of contamination emerged.
The lawsuit seeks more than $2 million in damages, asserting that both the city and its consultants — Griffin Structures and DMC Engineering — rushed out incomplete bid documents that ignored known environmental risks, a decision consistent with Chi’s management style during his tenure: prioritizing appearances of progress over sound ex*****on.
Rushing the Process, Ignoring Red Flags
Internal city emails reveal that staff and consultants knew before awarding the contract that key cleanup requirements were missing from the final bid package. Rather than pause the process to correct the errors, they discussed how to “cover” the omissions if a contractor later objected. This decision reflects the Chi administration’s larger pattern — a culture of haste, ambiguity, and disregard for technical realities.
The errors weren’t minor. Bid documents listed only 29 cubic yards of hydrocarbon-contaminated soil for removal; REI ended up excavating 5,612 cubic yards, hauling off more than 8,000 tons of toxic material. Similarly, the city specified 82 tons of lead-contaminated soil, but contractors encountered 515 tons in the field.
REI’s president, Richard Miller, said the company submitted over 70 change orders, compared with an industry norm of less than a dozen — a signal that “the city’s documents were nowhere near accurate or complete.”
Misunderstanding the Basics
The scale of these discrepancies reveals not just clerical mistakes but a fundamental misunderstanding by city leadership of the project’s technical and regulatory requirements. Under Chi, the city repeatedly launched projects without proper environmental due diligence or coordination with state regulators — all in an effort to generate headlines about Great Park “momentum.”
The Cultural Terrace job began in March 2024 as a $4.9 million demolition and grading contract but ballooned to nearly $10 million in actual costs. REI alleges that Griffin Structures — the city’s construction manager — refused to process change orders promptly, leaving the contractor burdened with millions in unapproved work.
Warnings Ignored
Emails from March 2024 show consultants explicitly warning that remediation for underground steam lines and hazardous material removal in key buildings had been omitted from the final bid. Rather than fix the issue, one consultant suggested the city would be “okay” legally if challenged — a short-term, risk-blind approach emblematic of Chi’s administration.
Months later, those same consultants confirmed that the missing documents and drawings “were never made part of the bid package.” Despite this, the city pressed forward, awarding the contract and later blaming the contractor for delays and costs — a familiar pattern of reactive governance and blame-shifting under Chi.
Pattern of Mismanagement
The Cultural Terrace fiasco mirrors other costly disputes during Chi’s tenure. In 2024, Irvine quietly paid $4.2 million to settle with Beador Construction over similar “unforeseen conditions” and documentation errors on the University Drive expansion near UC Irvine. In both cases, the city’s haste to launch construction — without resolving known engineering and environmental questions — led to massive overruns, contractor disputes, and taxpayer losses.
Even after leaving Irvine, Chi’s tenure remains marked by a trail of unfinished or overbudget projects at the Great Park, from the failed amphitheater negotiations to delayed infrastructure contracts. The REI lawsuit now exposes how that same push to “show progress” extended even into the city’s environmental cleanup — where the costs of getting it wrong are measured not just in dollars, but in public trust.
A Rush Without a Plan
Ultimately, the REI case underscores how Oliver Chi’s management style — fast-tracking contracts, overlooking technical complexity, and downplaying risk — left the city vulnerable. In the drive to claim progress at the Great Park, Chi’s administration misread the basic realities of the site, mishandled environmental disclosures, and ignored internal warnings.
Now, Irvine taxpayers may again be paying the price for a city manager more focused on appearances than accountability.
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