A lawsuit Huntington Park filed on October 23 asks a court to trace more than $9 million the city paid toward a planned aquatics center and recover any funds that remain. JT Construction was hired to build the 30,000-square-foot facility, but the project has not yielded the promised center; the site remains an empty lot.
The city's complaint seeks to establish what happened to the project payments and recover any funds left over, according to Whittier Daily News.
Huntington Park first contracted with JT Construction in 2019 to build the aquatics center, initially valued at $23 million, with plans for a two-story facility featuring an Olympic-size pool.
Advance Payments and a Contested Bid
By September 2020, Huntington Park had already paid JT Construction $8.6 million, representing 35% of the total project cost at the time. The Construction Industry Force Account Council, which represents contractors and labor unions and monitors compliance with public contracting codes, challenged the city's no-bid selection of JT Construction from the start.
Facing that pressure, Huntington Park decided in December 2020 to restart the project and put it out to bid. JT Construction won that 2021 bid process, and the City Council awarded it the full $24 million contract again that year — but the aquatics center made no significant progress in the years that followed. The city kept sending payments to JT Construction after the 2021 award anyway, and the company continued collecting checks as recently as 2024, even as the project sat dormant.
Invoices cited in the complaint listed $841,000 for masonry walls, $892,800 for a swimming pool and $108,810 for an elevator.
Project plans and payment oversight
Huntington Park’s 2021 request for proposals described a broader facility than a pool alone, including locker rooms, showers, saunas and a second-floor exercise room overlooking the pool, according to the city’s request for proposals. As general procurement context, the California Department of General Services says its construction oversight for state buildings includes reviewing monthly payment applications against progress schedules and determining how much work is complete and what payment is owed. That description concerns state-building oversight; it does not establish what review procedures Huntington Park used for this project.
The Contractor's Own Claim Against the City
JT Construction isn't just a defendant — it's also pursuing its own money from Huntington Park. The company submitted a government claim against the city in February, demanding $17 million for what it calls breach of contract and damage to its credit, arguing the dispute made it harder to land new contracts. JT Construction has not filed a lawsuit over that claim.
The Failed Pool and a Criminal Investigation
The failed pool is also part of a criminal investigation.
In 2025, the district attorney's Bureau of Investigation raided 11 locations connected to the probe, including Huntington Park City Hall, the public works building, Salt Lake Park itself, the homes of JT Construction's owners, and the homes of consultant Efren Martinez, along with city officials Ricardo Reyes, Graciela Ortiz, Marilyn Sanabria, Karina Macias and Eddie Martinez, plus the offices of Unified Consulting Services. The search warrant executed at City Hall listed Efren Martinez as the case name, and investigators seized files touching at least four of his clients.
JT Construction was one of 16 clients that paid Unified Consulting Services at least $10,000 in 2019, and more than half of the firm's disclosed clients that year either had or soon would have business before the Huntington Park City Council.
The Construction Industry Force Account Council, which first challenged the no-bid contract award back in 2019, ultimately did not pursue additional litigation of its own over the bidding process. Instead, the organization turned over the information it had collected to the district attorney's office and has worked with prosecutors since the criminal investigation formally began in 2022, as the aquatics center sat unfinished and the money trail kept growing.
