An update to City of Aiken Ordered to Produce Project Pascalis Records, Former AMDC Officials Seek Full Disclosure of Project Pascalis Records, and Which Project Pascalis Records Remain Hidden from Public View?

by Don Moniak
July 17, 2025

For four years, the City of Aiken has pursued an unwritten policy of opaqueness regarding the disclosure of information related to Project Pascalis; and for that matter, the Pascalis project properties that the city still owns and is seeking to sell.

Throughout most of 2021, project details and progress were kept secret or obscured via multiple closed-door Executive Sessions.

In August 2021, Aiken City Council’s approval of a $10 million general obligation bond to fund the Aiken Municipal Development Commission’s (AMDC) purchase of Project Pascalis properties failed to identify any specific properties. Instead, the bond issuance was tied to purchases of any parcels in “the Parkway District” as part of a “land bank.” However, it was known to some, if not all, Council members that the properties in question were for the AMDC’s downtown Pascalis demolition and redevelopment project.

As reported in City of Aiken Information Games, obstructionism of citizen efforts to learn details of the project began in March 2022 when city officials issued identical, exorbitant** $5,312 fee determinations to two distinct and separate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requestors.*** Two months later, an identical fee determination letter was issued in reply to a third FOIA request; one bearing no similarity to the first two. None of the requestors became aware of this malfeasance until six months later.

In August 2022, City officials went further in their efforts to deter public inquiry by levying a charge of $48 per hour for time spent redacting Freedom-of-Information-released documents—but only for Pascalis-related queries. This tripling of FOIA fees was implemented under the justification that “high volumes” of requests were being filed.

That same month, officials attempted to redact project invoices that had previously been publicly disclosed. This trend would continue with the attempted redactions of legal invoices that were also already a matter of the public record; an effort that went as far as redacting the very term “Project Pascalis.”

In November 2022, one week after inadvertently posting the AMDC/RPM Development Partners purchase and sale agreement (PSA) in the City’s document repository, officials removed the document from public view only one day after the publication of the PSA in “Downtown Aiken Half Priced Sale.” That PSA remains in the public domain but is still not archived in the City’s document repository.

That same month, AMDC Commissioners Keith Wood and Chris Verenes objected to a “Joint Defense Agreement” for Blake et al vs City of Aiken et al (the Pascalis lawsuit), claiming that it would have “restricted frank, open, and complete information.” City Council opted not to honor their wishes and ultimately shut them out of an Executive Session to discuss the lawsuit.

As reported in Three Missing Pages, an arguably fraudulent $599 FOIA fee determination was made in April 2023 for a request pertaining to the Pascalis properties; one that ultimately led to a response involving only a single three-page document.

Sometime during the Summer of 2024, the City took down the AMDC’s website, aikenmdc.org, and in the process erased the history of the Pascalis project as viewed from the AMDC’s perspective.

Finally, in the case of Blake et al vs City of Aiken et al, in January 2025, a Judge ordered the City to produce requested records to the Plaintiffs by March 10, 2025–by this time, the City was claiming there were approximately 120,000 emails that met the discovery criteria.

There was a catch. The judge allowed a “clawback” of any documents the city deemed, within ninety days of the production of records, to fall into the privileged records category. The Plaintiffs, who had to commit to a nondisclosure agreement, then would have seven days to challenge the City’s assertions of privilege. All documentation is to be treated as confidential until a final determination is made on whether a document falls under the privileged category.

In May of this year, the City denied access to any property appraisals of its downtown Pascalis properties, citing the FOIA exemption for documents related to the sale or purchase of a property. Such knowledge earlier in the process would certainly have sullied the City’s proud announcement on June 9th of a new developer for the properties. (Seven weeks later, the appraisal was released. It showed the remaining six properties to be worth only $2.5 million, meaning a potential $5 million loss for the City.)

A few weeks later, City Solicitor Laura Jordan responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the Pascalis lawsuit discovery documents with a $45,000 fee determination (Figure 1).

While this beyond-exorbitant fee would never be paid, even in part, it has clear implications for city taxpayers who have already footed legal costs exceeding $200,000 (Figure 2).

The redaction fees cited in the FOIA response reflect the potential legal costs to the City of determining which of the reportedly 120,000 emails contain privileged information. But at a rate of $180-250 per hour, four times that quoted in the FOIA response, even a fraction of the total time dedicated to reviewing for privilege could yield costs similar to the $45,000 FOIA fee.

Finally, the City took more than six weeks to even reply to FOIA request 166-2025, filed on May 21, 2025, for a series of emails from Keith Wood and Chris Verenes. The statutory response time is only ten days.

For this request, the City charged $365 for redaction fees for a relatively meager 1,300 pages of records. In a separate email, the City made the spurious claim that the request that yielded a $45,000 fee “is duplicative of 166-2025 and the response will be issued through request 166-2025.” The City then canceled the $45,000 FOIA request.

Thus, according to the City of Aiken’s legal department, a request that involves an alleged 120,000 emails and requires a $45,000 fee to process is “duplicative” with a request that involves 1,300 pages that requires $365 to process.

As reported in Which Project Pascalis Records Remain Hidden from Public View, City Council members are on the record supporting the release of all Pascalis project records. Yet, nine months after Keith Wood and Chris Verenes revealed the presence of 120 emails that are in a “privilege log,” and four months after a judge ruled that any pre-July 2022 emails from the pair should be released, the privilege log documents remain a secret; although one that might be unlocked, at least in part, through a deposit to the city coffers.

To this day the City of Aiken continues to obfuscate and erect detours obstructing information access to Pascalis project records, whether it be exorbitant FOIA fees, nondisclosure agreements for discovery records, or excessive redactions.

This is not just a matter of withholding documents; it is a matter of withholding the basic facts as to whether city officials unwittingly violated state law or did so knowingly. Without a full accounting of the project, how can elected officials and city administrators arrive at any real lessons learned?

Footnotes

* In July 2022, AMDC Chair Keith Wood wrote, in a letter to the Historic Aiken Foundation, that the AMDC had purchased the Pascalis properties “at the behest” of City Council.

** According to South Carolina law (Section 30-4-30(2)(B)), public bodies “may establish and collect fees…reasonable fees not to exceed the actual cost of the search, retrieval, and redaction of records…the records must be furnished at the lowest possible cost to the person requesting the records… Fees may not be charged for examination and review to determine if the documents are subject to disclosure.“

In the case of the $45,000 FOIA fee determination, the City of Aiken charged unreasonable fees in two manners:

First, by inappropriately charging for review time to determine if documents needed redaction; whereas SC FOIA only allows for actual redaction time and explicitly states that fees may not be charged for examination and review time. Notably, the City also made the same mistake in 2022 for the $5,312 fee determination described in City of Aiken Information Games.

Second, by failing to acknowledge that the records requested were already in bulk files that had been released to the Plaintiffs in Blake et al vs City of Aiken et al. As such, the records were already reviewed for privileged and confidential legal status.

*** The City and AMDC did take the opportunity to create an illusion of openness by releasing information that was mostly already publicly available—i.e., news releases, AMDC resolutions, meeting minutes and agendas—on a new website, aikenmdc.org. Some of the new information did include spending receipts and banking information (the books), but very few pertinent records were released unless prompted by a FOIA request.