Day: April 11, 2008

After jousting with Constellation Brands Inc. for some eight years over an allegation that Constellation’s Arbor Mist wine cooler’s name infringes on their tiny regional winery’s Arbor Hill label, John and Katherine Brahm last month won a judge’s OK to have their complaint aired in a trial.
Not likely to make history in the annals of trademark law, the Brahms dispute might long be remembered in the local legal community for the yield-no-quarter battle it has sparked between two local legal titans.
Handed down Feb. 26 by U.S. District Judge Charles Siragusa, the 43-page decision came after a hard-fought court campaign of pre-trial maneuvers in a case whose twists and turns could be fodder for a daytime drama.
In a 2003 order, Magistrate Judge Jonathan Feldman, who heard arguments in the trademark dispute for more than two years before Siragusa took it over, described the relatively straightforward trademark dispute as “giving birth to a plethora of additional claims” involving “a tangled web of accusations and counter accusations sadly involving two of Rochester’s finest law firms.”
Feldman refers to Nixon Peabody LLP and Harter Secrest & Emery LLP, the area’s largest and second-largest law firms.
Nixon Peabody initially represented Constellation, but pulled out as the company’s lawyer in 2004. The law firm remains in the case as a defendant, however, facing malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty accusations leveled by the Brahms in a third-party sub-complaint. It is also the plaintiff in another sub-complaint seeking to disqualify Harter Secrest.
Harter Secrest attorneys remain involved as the Brahms’ lawyers and in defense of their own firm.
Attorneys representing Nixon Peabody, Harter Secrest, Constellation and the Brahms declined to comment on the cases.
In 2005, after more than two years of unsuccessfully urging the parties to sever the additional claims from the federal trademark case and argue them instead as a separate matter in a state court, Feldman lamented in another order that “disputes between the lawyers and the law firms have become even more acrimonious, while the merits of the underlying trademark case remain in their litigation infancy.”
Behind the trademark flap lies a skein of role reversals and shifting allegiances among the Brahms, their winery, Constellation and the law firms that arguably fueled the case’s wider-ranging disputes.

Wine industry

Longtime partners in marriage and in Arbor Hill Associates Inc., John and Katherine Brahm have owned and run their winery and gourmet foods firm in Naples since the late 1980s. It is a boutique operation. John Brahm states in an affidavit that they had hoped to grow the operation to national scope. But that ambition is far from realized.
Arbor Hill has reached beyond its tiny roadside store on a country road in Naples by building an Internet business, and its products are sold regionally in restaurants and liquor stores as far away as Saratoga Springs. But though its wines have won prizes, they have never come close to approaching the hundreds of millions of bottles in sales Constellation claims for Arbor Mist.
In one court pleading, the Brahms characterized the dispute as a battle pitting “one of the world’s smallest wineries against the world’s largest.”
Before starting Arbor Hill, John Brahm in the 1980s partly owned and ran Widmer Wine Cellars, a Yates County winery that Constellation-then known as Canandaigua Wine Co.-acquired. Six months after it bought Widmer, Constellation fired Brahm, who with his wife decided to start a new winery, Arbor Hill. Helping to organize their new business was the couple’s longtime law firm, Nixon Peabody.
Constellation at that time was a client of Harter Secrest. In 1995, however, the Harter Secrest partner who had long handled the Constellation account, James Locke III, jumped to Nixon Peabody. A member of Constellation’s board since 1983, Locke took the Constellation account with him.
When the Brahms first decided to press an infringement claim against Constellation, they did not broach the idea with their own law firm, which by that time was also Constellation’s firm, but instead started with a Rochester trademark and patent boutique, Cumpston & Shaw. By the time talks with Constellation started, Cumpston & Shaw had been acquired by Harter Secrest.
Court papers detail talks between Harter Secrest partner Kenneth Payment and Constellation’s original lawyer in the case, Nixon Peabody litigator Richard Rochford, first taking place in spring 2001. By fall 2002, the talks stalled. Payment by then had warned Rochford that a lawsuit could be likely, court papers state, but had agreed to give Constellation three-day’s warning before it lodged a court complaint.
But before the Brahms could act, Constellation sued first, filing an action in the U.S. Western District of New York’s Rochester division in October 2002. That complaint is the case in which Siragusa’s recent decision came. It asks the court to declare that Constellation’s Arbor Mist brand does not infringe on Arbor Hill’s trademark but also accuses Arbor Hill of infringement.
Preemptive strikes by potential defendants looking for an edge in court-known as declaratory judgment actions-are common in patent and trademark cases. Often, having served the purpose of signaling the filer’s willingness to fight in court, they die quiet, unnoticed deaths. This one touched off a firestorm neither side seems to have sought or anticipated.
Constellation’s case against Arbor Hill partly relies on the two brands’ relative size and coverage area. Arbor Mist’s far-larger coverage area should trump Arbor Hill’s claim on the Arbor name, Constellation maintains in its court complaint. But the brief also argues that if either name infringes, it is Arbor Hill’s, whose first wines went on the market after Constellation started distributing a Batavia-bottled wine called Arbor Valley. For that alleged infringement, Constellation seeks treble whatever damages a court might award.
Arbor Hill countered with motions stating its own case for Constellation’s alleged infringement and disputing Constellation’s claims.
Both sides filed summary judgment motions-Constellation seeking to have Arbor Hill’s trademark infringement claim declared null and Arbor Hill seeking to have its beef aired in court. Those motions were only the start of the action.

Issues over firms

The Brahms began by asking the court to disqualify Nixon Peabody for an alleged conflict of interest but later expanded their complaint to add breach of fiduciary duty and malpractice charges.
In their court filings, the Brahms paint themselves as loyal clients unjustly spurned by an ungrateful Nixon Peabody.
“In an economically driven decision,” the couple’s brief states, Nixon Peabody threw them over for a chance to serve a newer and far wealthier client.
In court papers, the Brahms detail a 40-year history as Nixon Peabody clients. Katherine Brahm’s deceased uncle, George Hawks, had been a partner in Nixon Peabody’s trusts and estates department. And partly because of the family connection, the couple’s brief states, the Brahms had used Nixon Peabody to do estate planning since the 1960s.
In 1982, they hired Nixon Peabody to help John Brahm arrange a leveraged buyout of Widmer and to set up Arbor Hill Partners, which Brahm first formed to acquire Widmer. Later, the partnership-in which John and Katherine Brahm are each 50 percent partners-kept Nixon Peabody on retainer for the next 15 years, the couple’s court complaint states.
Documents filed in the case show that only a few days after offering to update Arbor Hill trademark work for the Brahms in spring 2001, Nixon Peabody fired the Naples winery as a client, stating in a written communication that “given the firm’s current relationship with Constellation Brands, we respectfully must decline to accept any engagement from Arbor Hill.”
Also detailed in court papers is an exchange between Brahm and Nixon Peabody partner John Witmeyer, who had long done the couple’s trust and estate work, in which Witmeyer urged Brahm not to pull their estate-planning work from Nixon Peabody.
Witmeyer’s and Brahm’s conversation, a telephone exchange that took place shortly before the firm dismissed Arbor Hill, is detailed in an e-mail from Witmeyer to Rochford and in a declaration by Witmeyer. Both were filed as evidence by Nixon Peabody.
“Having become aware that Nixon Peabody was representing Constellation in a dispute with Arbor Hill early in May 2001,” Witmeyer states in the declaration, “I called (John Brahm) to discuss the situation on May 24, 2001. In that conversation, Mr. Brahm raised no concerns.”
A memo from Witmeyer to Rochford describes the conversation as “a nice, cordial call.”

Expert’s view

Roger Cramton, an expert witness hired by the Brahms’ legal team to analyze Nixon Peabody’s conduct in the case, took a darker view.
Cramton is a former Cornell University Law School dean and current Cornell Law emeritus professor and the co-author of texts on legal ethics and conflict-of-interest rules. In a 23-page declaration, examining the Brahms’ history with Nixon Peabody from a number of angles, Cramton finds little to commend Nixon Peabody’s conduct.
In Cramton’s view, Witmeyer’s contact with John Brahm was itself an ethical breach. In cases where conflicts of interest are an issue, the declaration states, disciplinary rules forbid contacts between a non-lawyer client unaccompanied by his own lawyer and an attorney with an opposing firm.
The Brahms’ would have been well within their rights to drop Nixon Peabody, but the law firm violated disciplinary rules when it fired Arbor Hill, Cramton adds. Even if the relationship between Arbor Hill and the law firm had been properly terminated, the legal expert states, Nixon Peabody still would have been open to conflict-of-interest charges for representing Constellation against its former client. Nixon Peabody’s continued handling of the Brahms’ estate planning further compounds the breach.
In deciding to take Constellation’s side in the trademark case, Cramton concludes, Nixon Peabody created a situation in which it would be virtually impossible for the firm to act without committing a serious ethical breach: As advisers to Arbor Hill in the precise area in which it was now suing the Naples Winery on behalf of a rival, Nixon Peabody could not possibly avoid using privileged information against its own client. And if it were to win the case for Constellation, Cramton added, the Brahms would be in line for damages for the bad legal work Nixon did in the 1980s, when it researched and registered the Arbor Hill trademark for them.
“If Arbor Hill’s trademark is in fact invalid,” Cramton states in the declaration, “Nixon’s prior work for Arbor Hill was incompetent. On the other hand, if that work was competent, Nixon’s current attack on (the Arbor Hill trademark) is frivolous, harassing and prejudicial to Arbor Hill.”
For its alleged breaches, Cramton asserts, Nixon Peabody should not only be liable for damages owed to the Brahms but also should be ordered to disgorge “the substantial fees it has earned in its improper representation of Constellation.”
Cramton’s declaration also takes Nixon Peabody to task for stalling for more than a year on a request from John Brahm to turn over any Arbor Hill files in its possession. Though it agreed to comply with Brahm’s initial request and with several later requests for the files Payment sub-mitted, Cramton states, Nixon Peabody failed on a number of occasions to deliv-er the files, only acceding to the requests after Payment asked the court to compel a turnover.
Discovered among the files and submitted by Harter Secrest as evidence in the trademark case was a brief but colorful evaluation of Katherine Brahm’s personal wealth. Included as a parenthetical aside in a handwritten memo on the tax consequences of organizing Arbor Hill as an S corporation, it reads, “She’s loaded.”
In an answering brief to the Brahms’ malpractice complaint, Michael Wolford of the Wolford Law Firm LLP in Rochester, one of several lawyers representing Nixon Peabody in the trademark case’s third- and fourth-party actions, denies Nixon Peabody had any liability to the Brahms or Arbor Hill. To the contrary, he asserts, Harter Secrest erred in not uncovering and advising the Brahms of Constellation’s pre-existing Arbor Valley label. Insofar as Arbor Hill took Harter Secrest’s advice in persisting with the case, the Wolford brief argues, Harter Secrest, not Nixon Peabody, is guilty of “malpractice, negligence or other improper conduct.”
Siragusa’s Feb. 28 ruling, which deals exclusively with the trademark case, does not specifically comment on the legal malpractice claims and counterclaims. A single paragraph in the decision addresses Constellation’s Arbor Valley claim.
“(Arbor Hill) never observed any Arbor Valley wine being sold in Western New York,” the ruling states. “Moreover, although (Arbor Hill’s) attorneys (at Nixon Peabody) conducted a trademark search in 1987 in connection with the federal registration of the Arbor Hill mark for food products, the search did not reveal Constellation’s use of the name Arbor Valley.”
In giving Arbor Hill a go-ahead to pursue its trademark complaint, Siragusa evaluated the Naples winery’s case according to how well it met the standards of six Polaroid factors, so-called after Polaroid Corp. v. Polarad Electric Corp., the 1960 case that set the current standard in trademark law. Siragusa gave Arbor Hill an edge in four of the six Polaroid factors.
In March, Constellation attorney Allen Baden, an intellectual property lawyer in Kenyon & Kenyon LLP’s Silicon Valley office, filed an 11-page motion calling on Siragusa to reconsider his February 28 ruling. Dispensing with the customary wait for Arbor Hill’s lawyers to file a countermotion, Siragusa fired back on March 14 with an eight-page response unequivocally affirming his earlier ruling.
No trial date is set.
[email protected] / 585-546-8303

04/11/08 (C) Rochester Business Journal

Top local executives of MVP Health Care Preferred Care saw their pay drop substantially in 2007. The drop, however, did not represent a pay cut but a reflection of extra rewards they received in 2006, the company said.
In 2007, the HMO’s three highest-paid local officers-Lisa Brubaker, executive vice president; Thomas Combs, chief financial officer; and Carl Cameron M.D., medical director-saw drops in compensation of 21 percent, 24 percent and 14 percent respectively, documents filed April 1 with the state Department of Insurance show.
Brubaker, who is in charge of Preferred Care’s day-to-day operations, made $450,224 last year, down from $572,515. Combs’ 2007 compensation of $488,615 fell from $641,545 in 2006. Cameron’s 2007 pay of $405,854 was down from $474,182 a year earlier, the state filings show.
The trio’s five- or six-figure reductions in dollars last year reflected retention bonuses the HMO’s board voted to give top officers to keep them from jumping ship in Preferred Care’s 2006 acquisition by the Schenectady-based MVP, Preferred Care spokesman Michael Traphagan said. He declined to state the retention awards’ amounts. The bonuses accounted for most but not all of the difference between 2006 and 2007 compensation totals.
In dollars and the numbers of executives among the 25 highest-paid local health insurance officials, the larger Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield, Rochester Region-this area’s largest health insurance carrier and the state’s second-largest-dominates Preferred Care. In 2007, its top officials saw healthy compensation upswings.
President and CEO David Klein’s $2.6 million 2007 compensation was up 43 percent from $1.8 million in 2006. CFO Emil Duda’s $1.8 million in compensation took a 23 percentage point leap over his $1.5 million 2006 compensation.
In addition to its Rochester home base, Excellus runs Blues plans in the Finger Lakes, Syracuse, Watertown, Utica and Rome and runs the Univera Health Care HMO in Western New York. The Rochester Blues decline to say how many of Excellus’ 2 million enrollees are in the nine-county Rochester region.
Preferred Care is the region’s second-largest private health insurance carrier. It writes policies for some 30 percent of the roughly 1 million covered lives in the nine-county Rochester region’s private health insurance market. Its 310,000 subscribers account for more than half of MVP Preferred Care’s 700,000 enrollees.
When announced several weeks ago, the jumps in the Excellus executives’ pay and Klein’s raise in particular raised local eyebrows and drew some criticism.
Determining the fairness of executive pay “is a really thorny question,” said Kent Gardner, president and chief economist of the Center for Governmental Research Inc. “There are two ways of looking at it, vertically and horizontally.”
In a horizontal analysis, Gardner said, one would give more weight to factors such as what executives’ peers at other organizations in their industry make. In a vertical analysis, one would give more weight to factors such as what value the executives produced for the organization and, in the case of non-profits such as Excellus and Preferred Care, how well they fulfilled or advanced their organizations’ missions.
Representatives of MVP Preferred Care and Excellus described similar processes for determining how they pay top managers: Pay ranges and specific compensation packages are set and reviewed by board compensation committees consisting of independent directors whose deliberations are kept at arm’s length from the officers whose rewards they are deciding.
MVP Preferred Care’s directors use a base and bonus methodology, said Gary Hughes, a company spokesman. The method sets a base portion of executives’ compensation at a predetermined amount and awards any bonus according to how well the executive met preset targets. Hughes declined to discuss specific goals or targets used, or how compensation was split between salary and bonus amounts. Targets the board might set could include reaching certain enrollment figures, increasing cash reserves by a given amount and meeting care and service quality goals, he said.
Asked to describe criteria Excellus’ board compensation committee used, officials supplied a prepared statement from Excellus chairman John Doyle and charts comparing Klein’s compensation to pay packages of Blues CEOs of other non-profit and for-profit health insurers.
Doyle, CEO of Doyle Security Systems Inc., describes a process dating to 2003 when the Excellus board compensation committee “acknowledged findings from consultants that total compensation for the CEO was below the market median among comparable sized health plans in the U.S.”
At that time, Doyle added, the committee created long-term performance incentives that would reward executives with above-average pay for above-average performance. If executives’ performance was below average, however, the committee would “likely (set their pay) at or below the median.” Klein’s and Duda’s 2007 compensation included long-term incentive for performance goals met or exceeded from 2004 to 2006.
A chart, supplied by James Redmond, Rochester Blues vice president of communications, comparing Klein’s 2006 compensation with compensation drawn by CEOs of non-profit Blues plans in other states shows Klein’s $1.6 million in total compensation to have fallen slightly under the $1.9 million average pay drawn by 19 non-profit Blues CEOs. Klein’s pay lagged several of his peers.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida CEO Robert Lufrano M.D. drew $5.7 million. The Florida Blues at that time had 1.7 million members and premium revenues of $4.9 billion to Excellus’1.9 million members and $4.8 billion in revenues.
That chart shows Klein’s base pay in 2006 was $800,000, while his bonus came to $754,794. Other compensation of $64,312 paid for unstated reasons rounded out his pay package. Redmond said he was not able to supply a similar breakdown for 2007 and was not sure where the newsletter that compiled the chart, the AIS Report, got its figures.
Peer-to-peer comparisons such as those used by the Excellus compensation committee to set pay for Klein and other top executives are ostensibly fair but in some ways potentially troublesome, CGR’s Gardner said. Public company and non-profit compensation committees and the consultants they hire often cite the possibility of executives being wooed away by better-paying rivals as reasons for rewarding them with comparable or higher pay but do not give adequate consideration to how top managers’ pay levels line up with average workers’ rewards.
Public company and non-profit compensation committee members are often CEOs and high-level managers themselves, he added. Though they might scrupulously keep their compensation committee decisions at arm’s length, as potential beneficiaries of similar decisions made by their own company’s boards, they could be inadvertently influenced by a system that has come to over-reward top managers. A growing gap in wealth between a relatively tiny group of very high-income Americans and the mass of less wealthy citizens whose real incomes are falling is seen as a matter of increasing concern by a number of economists, Gardner said.
Still, he added, if that system is seriously out of whack, correcting it would be “a hard nut to crack.”
[email protected] / 585-546-8303

The top five

Excellus officials dominate the list of the top 25 highest-paid local health insurance officials.

1. David Klein,
president and CEO $2,563,731

2. Emil Duda,
senior EVP and CFO $1,816,707

3. Morris Levene,
senior VP $1,492,796

4. Christopher Booth,
executive VP and corporate
general counsel $1,214,881

5. Paul Von Ebers,
executive VP and COO $808,321

What they earned in 2007

Excellus’ top executive enjoyed a 43 percent jump in pay last year. Preferred Care’s three highest local executives, meanwhile, saw their compensation drop-but only because they received “retention” bonuses in the HMO’s 2006 acquisition by the Schenectady-based MVP.
% change Executive 2007 pay since 2006
1. David Klein, president and CEO $2,563,731 43
2. Emil Duda, senior executive vice president
and chief financial officer $1,816,707 23
3. Morris Levene, senior VP, business development
and management consulting1 $1,492,796 217
4. Christopher Booth, executive VP, chief administrative
officer and corporate general counsel $1,214,881 7
5. Paul Von Ebers, executive VP and chief operating officer2 $808,321 95
6. Martin Hickey M.D., senior VP, health care affairs $570,873 4
7. Virginia Parysek, senior VP, human resources $570,515 6
8. Thomas Combs, Preferred Care/MVP Health Care CFO $488,615 -24
9. Stephen Sloan, senior VP and general counsel3 $470,339 62
10. William Simmons, senior VP, finance $461,188 8
11. Lisa Brubaker, Preferred Care/MVP executive VP,
Rochester and government affairs $450,224 -21
12. Karen Smith, senior VP, operations $449,127 5
13. Martin Lustik M.D., senior VP and
corporate medical director $437,009 27
14. David McDowell, senior VP, information technology
and chief information officer4 $427,854 24
15. David Mack, senior VP, corporate relations $421,164 4
16. Scott Ellsworth, Rochester region president $416,389 2
17. Carl Cameron M.D., Preferred Care/MVP medical director $405,854 -14
18. Mark Ruszczyk, senior VP, marketing and sales $370,909 37
19. Geoffrey Taylor, senior VP, corporate communications $337,633 6
20. Robert Toczynski, chief corporate actuary $319,764 6
21. Keith Volkmar, senior VP, corporate administration $303,005 5
22. Anthony Tardugno, senior VP, IT and CIO4 $286,366 27
23. Anne Ruflin, VP, Medicare strategy $278,480 21
24. Margaret Clark, VP, government program compliance $277,605 31
25. Joel Owerbach, chief pharmacy officer $276,026 14

1 Levene retired in 2007 and received a onetime payment of a long-term performance award earned as head of MedAmerica Inc, a for-profit subsidiary of Excellus’ parent company, Lifetime Health Care Cos. Inc., which he headed from 1996 to 1999.
2 In 2007, Von Ebers was promoted from senior VP, marketing and sales, to COO.
3 Sloan joined Excellus in 2006 and worked part of the year.
4 McDowell left Excellus in 2007; Tardugno was promoted to CIO in 2007.
Unless otherwise noted, all are Excellus executives.

04/11/08 (C) Rochester Business Journal

Carlton DeWolff and his wife got the royal treatment last week-literally, at a lavish ceremony near Amman, Jordan, to honor the late King Hussein.
DeWolff’s firm has designed an 800,000-square-foot hospital for a mountaintop roughly 15 miles southwest of Amman and overlooking the Dead Sea.
On April 1, DeWolff and his wife, Jean, were there to watch King Abdullah lay the foundation stone for the $250 million complex.
The King Hussein Institute for Biotechnology and Cancer groundbreaking was a milestone for DeWolff Partnership Architects LLP, but the design process is ongoing.
“As things change, you go through schematic design, which is a rough design of it, and then design development is where you really squeeze nuts to bolts. The final design comes out of that. That’s about where we are right now,” said James Newton, business development manager at De-Wolff Partnership.
“We’re about a third of the way through design development,” he added.
Despite the local firm’s history of designing health care facilities, little could be done to prepare it for the scope of this project, Newton said.
“A few weeks ago, I remember Bud said, ‘You have to remember, we’re not dealing with a client. We’re dealing with a country.’ Right there, that’s the difference,” Newton said.
DeWolff said the king did not want the typical hospital. He wanted a city on top of a mountain-but not a modern city, more of a village square, DeWolff explained. The king thought DeWolff’s initial 2005 renderings captured that.
“And the project had to be secret,” DeWolff added. “I couldn’t talk to anyone about it because the rule is until his majesty has approved everything it is not to be published. We were working under a cloak of secrecy.”
The Institute is the largest project in the firm’s history-close to 20 consultants, including medical programmers, research laboratory consultants and equipment consultants to determine how the hospital rooms and departments should be organized.
To coordinate the different parties, the firm holds regular conferences and records them to verify details and keep people on the same page. In addition, the firm has set up an office in Jordan where the consultants and designers meet.
In addition to the hospital, design plans include amenities for patients’ families and visiting medical professionals, such as a hotel, conference center, shopping areas and dining areas.
The complex is slated to include entertainment facilities for patients and housing for elderly cancer patients.
The project is ambitious but extremely exciting, Newton said.
The groundbreaking itself was mind-blowing, DeWolff said.
“In 45 years I have never been involved in a groundbreaking like this,” DeWolff said.
The pomp and circumstance was extraordinary and exceeded only by King Hussein’s funeral nine years ago, De-Wolff was told.
“It was like a movie,” DeWolff said.
Dignitaries mingled at the reception where tall billowing drapes of sheer white cascaded over white carpeting laid over the rocky landscape, Jean DeWolff said.
“It was phenomenal, done in a Bedouin-style tent. It just kept going and going,” she said.
DeWolff Partnership ranked fourth among architecture firms in Rochester on the most recent Rochester Business Journal list, ranked by the number of local registered architects. Health care is one of the firm’s specialties. Local examples include Geneva General Hospital, Monroe Community Hospital Wellness and Fitness Center, Park Ridge Hospital and the Sands Cancer Center.
But it was the firm’s work out of state that attracted the king’s attention, Newton said.
The firm was mentioned when a former client heard the King of Jordan was looking to build a research facility.
Samir Khlief M.D., who will head the institute, originally spoke to James Black M.D. about the project when it was but an idea.
“That connection comes back to us because we had done major work at Johns Hopkins University when Dr. Black was the CEO there and also the University Hospitals at Cleveland when he was CEO there,” Newton said.
Both men are collaborators on the project.
Among them is associate architect Khaled Azzam. The Egyptian, with offices in England and Egypt, has helped the firm understand the myriad design considerations for the project-cultural and religious. Azzam has previous experience working with the king on the design of his palace.
“He’s been an amazing help,” DeWolff said.
“I designed the footprint and the concept, and I had an entry, which in the United States usually is a very large statement. (Azzam) pointed out that in the villages there are no big statement entries,” De-Wolff explained. “What you do is create a very dignified entry that’s not overwhelming, and then you decorate it with Jordanian details, geometrics and things like that.”
Unlike the consultants, who are mainly Americans, contractors for the project will be Jordanians.
“The construction value there is a lot cheaper than here, obviously,” Newton said.
DeWolff said if the project were to be built with U.S. contractors the total cost would not be $250 million but closer to $500 million.
“I cannot even describe this project, it’s so special,” DeWolff said. It will combine the most modern equipment near what will look like an ancient town square, complete with kiosks for vendors selling fruits and vegetables.
[email protected] / 585-546-8303

04/11/08 (C) Rochester Business Journal