Why we put the trucks on the road

Driving a billboard truck around downtown Phoenix is not how I would choose to spend my time or my money. I want to explain, as plainly as I can, how we got here — because I think most Arizonans would be as frustrated by this as I am.

We didn’t go looking for this deal. The ACA called us.

On November 21, 2025, the Arizona Commerce Authority’s Senior Real Estate Coordinator reached out to my Vice President of Operations. The ACA was looking for a new headquarters. Four days later they toured our building. A week after that they sent us a formal Request for Proposal.

We were thrilled. 200 East Van Buren is a recently renovated Class A tower that we own and that we have poured money into. We are local. Our ownership group lives here, works here, and reinvests here. Landing the state’s economic development agency as an anchor tenant would have been a genuinely great thing — for the building, for that block, and for downtown.

We did everything they asked. Every single time.

We hired architects and engineers to draw ACA-specific concept plans. We paid for that out of pocket. When they asked us to reconfigure from two full floors to 35,000 square feet, we did it. When they asked us to swap six valet-serviced events for validation hours, we came back the next day with 1,800 full-day parking validations. When they asked for reserved executive parking, they got fifteen reserved spaces in the 2nd Street garage.

Then we cut our own price. We offered roughly 50,000 contiguous square feet and charged rent on only 40,000. Ten thousand square feet, free, on top of a rate that was already the lowest in the competition.

And on January 30, 2026, because the ACA wanted to see it with their own eyes, we set out more than two hundred chairs in our conference space and staged a mock event so they could walk it. We did that. For them. On request.

Then the lights went out.

In March they mentioned, for the first time in four months, that they had been looking at another property. In April we asked for the chance to match or beat whatever they had. We were told we’d hear after the Board Executive Committee met that Monday.

We never heard back. No award notice. No rejection. No debrief. No score. Nothing.

On June 1 a commercial broker — not the ACA — told us the agency was going to the Collier Center. We asked one more time for a chance to compete on price. We were told leadership “remains focused on their negotiations with another building.”

Here is the part that actually made me angry.

When we finally got an explanation, it wasn’t about our building. A member of the ACA board told me by text:

Brand. The Collier Center is owned by a subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation, a Japanese trading conglomerate. We lost, apparently, to a name.

The word “brand” does not appear in the RFP. Neither does “ownership strength,” which is the six-point line item the ACA’s scoring sheet uses to say the same thing in nicer language. We were never told we were being graded on who our owners were. If we had been, we would at least have known the competition was unwinnable before we spent the money.

What we were trying to build here

The reason we chased this so hard wasn’t just the rent. We had pitched the ACA on something bigger: an AI and innovation hub at 200 East Van Buren that would connect Arizona businesses, startups, the universities, workforce programs and emerging technology companies in one place.

Look at where we sit. We are steps from ASU’s Downtown Phoenix campus. We are next to Arizona Center. We are in the middle of the part of downtown that is actually trying to become an innovation district. Putting the state’s economic development agency in that building, with a conference centre that seats two hundred, was a chance to make an ecosystem instead of just a lease.

We sent that idea over on June 3. The answer came back that the relevant executive was out of the office until the following week.

So: a local group building an ecosystem lost to a foreign corporation’s brand — and taxpayers pay millions more for it.

The listed rate at the Collier Center is $37.00 a square foot. Ours worked out to about $24 all-in, with operating expenses inside the rent and the entire build-out on us. Count the rent difference and the build-out we were absorbing and it comes to four to five million dollars over the term.

And on the ACA’s own scoring sheet — the one we finally saw — we scored a perfect 10 out of 10 on price. They gave the Collier Center a 7. We won the price category outright and finished dead last overall, 60 to 95, on the strength of criteria that were never in the RFP.

Arizona’s economic development agency — the agency whose entire job is to help Arizona businesses grow — passed over a local, cheaper, purpose-built option and moved into some of the most expensive offices in the city, owned from overseas. I don’t think that’s what taxpayers fund it to do.

And we cannot find anyone who approved it.

I went and looked myself. I read the ACA’s published board and executive committee agendas. I read the minutes. I read the presentation materials. I pulled the public recordings of board meetings and had transcripts made so I could search them.

There is no public vote approving this lease. No minutes recording one. Nothing.

A multi-year, multi-million-dollar commitment of public money, and I cannot find the moment where a public body voted for it in public. Arizona’s Open Meeting Law says that vote has to happen in the open and has to be written down. So we asked for the records on June 5. On June 19 the ACA’s General Counsel wrote back that the agency had run a “robust and diligent” process and that our proposal was rejected after a “material and substantive evaluation” — and attached nothing. No matrix. No evaluation. No minutes. No approval.

The letter criticised us for relying on hearsay. We were relying on hearsay because the ACA would not give us anything else.

Why a truck?

Because we tried everything quieter first, and none of it worked.

• We asked politely, twice, for a chance to compete on price. Refused both times.
• We sent a formal demand for the public records. Denied.
• We filed a protest under the ACA’s own procedure. Denied, with no documents attached.
• We filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court. That is now pending.

A lawsuit is slow and most people will never read a court docket. The people paying for this lease are the people driving past these buildings every day. They are entitled to know that their economic development agency ran a competition without publishing the rules, scored it on things it never asked about, cannot point to a public vote approving it, and will not show anyone the file.

So the trucks are out. They say where to find the documents. That’s all they do.

What we are actually asking for

If the ACA releases that file and it shows a fair, contemporaneous, documented evaluation that we simply lost, I will say so publicly, on this website, and the trucks will stop. I mean that.

But if a state agency can run a seven-month competition, ask a local company to spend its own money on drawings and set out two hundred chairs, hand the deal to a more expensive foreign-owned building for reasons that were never in the solicitation, and then decline to produce a single evaluation document or board vote — then no Arizona business can trust an ACA procurement again. That is bigger than our building.

It isn’t fair. That’s really the whole thing. It isn’t fair, and it was done with money that belongs to all of us.

See the scoring matrix →   Read the documents yourself →