A jury has ordered the Utah Inland Port Authority to pay more than $4 million to a company it once awarded a controversial no-bid contract, finding the agency broke its agreement.
The Oct. 17 verdict comes after a two-year legal battle with QuayChain Technologies, a logistics company the state picked to construct an extensive surveillance network that would have used artificial intelligence to monitor freight movement. The port authority stopped paying the company after it attempted to cancel the agreement after Utah lawmakers restructured its leadership.
“This case was about accountability and fairness in government contracting,” said Thaddeus Wendt, QuayChain’s trial attorney, in a written statement sent Monday. “The jury’s decision reaffirms that when a public entity enters into a contract, it has to keep its word just like anyone else.”
The jury sided with QuayChain after a five-day trial, concluding the port authority had not performed its contractual obligations. Jurors awarded QuayChain $4.2 million in costs and another $457,000 in damages.
Current port authority leadership has asserted the agreement with QuayChain (pronounced “keychain”) was “unethical,” that the company did not deliver on its promises and that the state had fairly paid the contractor for its work.The port authority’s executive director, Ben Hart, said the state is contemplating whether it will appeal.
“At the end of the day, we feel like this was a partnership that we needed to rethink,” Hart said in an interview, “and we had a different view from the current vendor.”
The port authority had come under scrutiny in 2022 after The Salt Lake Tribune uncovered several contracts awarded to companies without going through the normal state procurement process. A legislative audit knocked the port authority for its lack of transparency and overuse of such contracts months later.
The port authority had issued at least 43 contracts to 29 vendors, the investigation found. And 81% of those agreements never went out for bid.
QuayChain was tasked in July 2021 with building the “Intelligent Crossroads Network” for the port authority’s massive jurisdictional area in Salt Lake City’s northwest quadrant.
The network would have used multiple cameras and machine learning to capture and process data related to trucks and cargo. The port authority’s director at the time, Jack Hedge, asserted no other company but QuayChain could build it.
According to contract documents, the deal with the state allowed QuayChain to profit further by selling subscriptions for the surveillance data — collected via taxpayer-funded equipment — to private freight companies and cargo handlers.
In an interview with The Tribune in 2022, a Utah computing professor balked at the port authority’s insistence that QuayChain was the only outfit that could build the Intelligence Crossroads Network, which included off-the-shelf products and existing AI platforms.
In a deposition last year, Hart, the port authority’s current director, indicated he had been approached by Google and other tech companies with “similar-type capabilities” to build the network QuayChain had proposed.
“The reality is this is not something that’s brand new,” Hart said in the deposition. “This has been done in other places.”
In a statement Thursday, QuayChain said the project included devices and software that were “proprietary and developed in-house by its own engineering team.”
The audit further raised alarm about a nonprofit formed by previous port leadership and QuayChain, called the “Intelligent Crossroads Lab.” Hart denounced that move as “unethical” in his deposition, saying the port decision to funnel taxpayers’ dollars to a nonprofit that “doesn’t have the same level of oversight, that’s a huge level of concern,” Hart testified.
The Legislature overhauled the port authority’s leadership amid the contract kerfuffle, giving the board more oversight. It replaced Hedge with Hart — who had been on the port authority board — in September 2022, weeks before the audit results became public. Hart immediately began meeting with Andrew Scott, QuayChain’s CEO. The port authority told the vendor it was terminating its contract that November. Hart also dissolved the Intelligent Crossroads Lab nonprofit.
QuayChain sued the port authority in 2023, alleging the state owed $8 million in labor, equipment, materials and services.
The port authority asserted its contract capped payments to QuayChain at $2 million, and it had paid out nearly all of its obligation while getting little in return.QuayChain argued the $2 million “cap” only applied to a subsequent funding agreement issued after the contract was signed, and that it only covered poorly defined “costs,” not the company’s ongoing services. The contractor continued sending the port authority monthly $100,000 invoices for “management” fees until at least May 2024, according to court records.
“I felt strongly that Andrew (Scott) was completely dismissive of the fact that he had completely unfulfilled his contract,” Hart said in his deposition. “He didn’t care that he just screwed the state out of $2 million and had nothing to show for it.”
The port director confirmed in an interview that the Intelligent Crossroads Network and its state-funded equipment is not currently in use.
The jury, however, ordered the state to pay the invoices from QuayChain, which had successfully launched the project at the intermodal hub in Salt Lake City, said Wendt, QuayChain’s attorney, in his statement Thursday. “The idea that the Port ‘had nothing to show for it’ was refuted by the evidence and rejected by the jury,” Wendt said.
Wendt added that when the authority stopped paying QuayChain, the company was “forced to lay off 90 percent of its employees (including those in Utah), stop paying their benefits, close its office in Salt Lake City, and end relationships it had been developing with large companies looking to invest in Utah, such as Intel and AWS.”
Wendt asserted the company was mindful the judgment would be paid with taxpayer funds and that he had tried to settle with the port authority for far less.
“Unfortunately the Port declined every offer,” Wendt wrote in the Monday statement, “leaving us no choice but to proceed to trial. This verdict represents the consequence of those decisions.”
The port authority will follow the court’s orders, Hart said in an interview. He added that if the agency decides to build another cargo surveillance network in the future, it will seek proposals from multiple vendors through transparent procurement.
“QuayChain definitely has some unique capabilities,” Hart said. “But at the same time, we feel like it’s best to go through a public process to validate that.”
Note to readers • 5:45 p.m. Oct. 31, 2025: This story has been updated to include additional context and information about the dispute and the jury’s decision.