The City of Columbia, South Carolina, signed an $8.9 million contract with Louisville, Kentucky-based engineering firm CMTA, Inc. to build a solar facility at its Metro Wastewater Treatment Plant. The project is heavily funded by a federal U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Climate Pollution Reduction Grant, managed by a regional planning body called the Central Midlands Council of Governments (COG).
Local commercial solar developer Colite Technologies submitted a $6.7 million bid for the project, but the city disqualified the company due to conflict-of-interest rules. Columbia City Councilman Peter Brown holds a partial ownership stake in Colite Technologies and sat on the COG board when the bid was submitted.
While the city initially believed Brown resigning from the COG board and recusing himself from council votes resolved the issue, the COG ruled there was no remedy under its procurement guidelines. The regional group threatened to withdraw the federal funding entirely if the city considered Colite’s bid.
The procurement dispute highlights a reality for the commercial solar development market: federal grant money frequently shifts the rules of the game mid-bid. When federal dollars flow through regional planning boards, conflict-of-interest and compliance guidelines can completely override local city rules. For developers, this means a project that looks like a locked-in local win can get derailed by federal administrative mandates, forcing municipalities to leave millions of dollars on the table just to keep their funding intact.
(Read: “The messy middle of C&I solar”)
Colite filed a lawsuit against the city on June 9, 2026, arguing that the disqualification violated local procurement rules. Colite leadership maintains that the conflict could have been resolved simply by Brown recusing himself from any project decisions.
“The disappointing thing is that we’ve invested a lot of money here in the local community, we’ve built a very successful, competitive company,” said Kevin O’Hara, co-founder and CEO of Colite Technologies. “Then when an opportunity comes up in the local community, we get arbitrarily removed from it.”
Court filings show the city scored Colite’s proposal the lowest of six total bidders. Colite’s leadership alleges the low score was applied retroactively after legal counsel became involved in the dispute.
Colite dropped its request to block construction so the wastewater project could move forward, but the company is pursuing the lawsuit to force a formal review of the city’s bidding practices. A judge is scheduled to hear the city’s motion to dismiss the case on September 16, 2026.
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