On a recent fall afternoon in Springfield’s North End, the site looked like nothing at all: a barren parking lot that pedestrians crossed as a shortcut, trash drifting across the concrete, as the Boston Globe described it, “like urban tumbleweeds.” On this block, the state of Massachusetts intends to raise a courthouse that will cost $2 billion.
The number is real, and it is also not what it seems. Construction itself is estimated at $462 million in the winning proposal — perhaps as much as $525 million, state officials said. The rest is time: rent payments over at least 40 years will top $1.6 billion, with the remainder covering the ordinary costs of operating a building across four decades, said Hannah Carrillo, a spokesperson for the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, the state agency running the procurement.
None of this has quieted anyone. From Gentile and her colleagues in the Hampden County courthouse, to the mayor of Springfield, to the unhappy losing bidders, the complaints run against both the site and the team chosen to build on it — a Northern Virginia firm specializing in government facilities, joined by a pair of politically connected Boston developers.
Half a billion to build
Even the construction figure startles. Half a billion dollars for a 300,000-square-foot courthouse is more than twice what the Lowell Justice Center cost — a 263,000-square-foot, 17-courtroom building finished for about $184.9 million, roughly $700 per square foot, just before the pandemic — and roughly double what the state’s own real estate arm estimated for Springfield 18 months ago. As late as March 2025, a DCAMM briefing obtained by the Globe put the project at $700 to $800 per square foot; the Globe’s analysis of the winning bid shows construction above $1,500 per square foot. Federal data show the cost of building a government facility up 40 percent since early 2020, with steel and copper more than doubled from pre-pandemic prices and ornamental metalwork up nearly 125 percent. Supply chains, inflation, tariffs, and wars in Ukraine and Iran: all of it is in the concrete.
The Healey administration chose not to build the courthouse at all — not in the old way, in which the state finances, builds, and owns. A private team will build it instead, on land the state will not own, and Massachusetts will pay rent. Officials argue the arrangement opens the courthouse five years faster, locks in rents against inflation, and saves taxpayers $154 million over its first decade, Carrillo said. Karissa Hand, a spokesperson for Governor Maura Healey, said it “will replace a sick building with a new, modern facility and bring thousands of jobs and economic activity to Springfield.” Such deals are increasingly common as states get “more sophisticated in financing,” said Anthony Flint, a Boston-based researcher of public-private partnerships. “The days of a purely government-built public building may be over.”
The chosen team
The winner calls itself Liberty Junction. Its lead developer is FD Stonewater of Virginia, whose 266-page bid cites “a stable of institutional and high-net-worth” investors to finance construction, to be repaid by the state over the lease, and imagines the vacant former medical office building on the site becoming “a civic anchor for Springfield.” Its partners include CoJo Real Estate, led by Conan Harris — the husband of U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley — and John Barros, the interim head of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and Boston’s former economic development chief. Individually the pair have developed smaller residential homes; as a team they have never developed large-scale commercial property. After an uproar over his involvement, Barros said he will divest from the company.
The state defends the choice on experience. Hand said the winning bid “had the team with the strongest experience building courthouses,” and in such partnerships, said Pam McKinney, a Boston real estate consultant, choosing developers with relevant experience is “in some ways, more important than just the numbers.” The record is mixed. The architect, Leers Weinzapfel Associates, has designed eight federal, state, and county courthouses along the East Coast; the contractor, Suffolk Construction, built a juvenile justice courthouse in Florida and renovated two courthouses in Boston — projects its bid does not mention. Stonewater has built government facilities across the country, yet beyond a passing reference to “redesigned courtrooms” in its $150 million redevelopment of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Virginia headquarters, its winning bid identifies no specific courthouse experience.
Liberty Junction was not the cheap option. The four finalists each proposed the required 40-year lease; the other three estimated construction at $409 million, $428 million, and $525.8 million, leaving the winner’s construction price the second-highest of the bunch. Because a 40-year lease is atypical for a state project, the Asset Management Board had to approve it, and in January 2025 it did — over a single holdout vote from Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro, a skeptic of long-term leases, whose spokesperson declined to say more.
The project was born of lawsuits and complaints from court employees who feared for their health inside the hulking existing building; the state began the replacement process in 2024. What is planned now is a 30-courtroom “justice center,” to be built by an estimated 2,000 union workers under a labor agreement signed last month, with dedicated elevators for detainees and hallways reserved for judges, juries, lawyers, and court staff — in effect two separate buildings folded into one. Around it, Liberty Junction envisions restaurants, housing, and small businesses anchoring a neighborhood decimated by urban renewal decades ago.
Bud Williams, a five-term state representative who grew up in this neighborhood, looks at the renderings of gleaming windows and tree-lined corridors and sees “a breath of fresh air” for the community. Stopping the project, or bidding it out again, would only prolong the wait, he said. “The train has left the station,” he said, as a freight train rumbled across the nearby railroad tracks. “When the train leaves, it’s out.” Governments once built their own monuments; now they lease them, forty years at a time, and call the lease a savings. Whether Springfield has bought a courthouse or merely rented its future, the meter starts either way.