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This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partners at Maryland Matters. Sign up for Maryland Matters’ free email subscription today.

The state is moving closer to awarding a lucrative 20-year contract to run the concessions operations at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport — a year and a half after Gov. Wes Moore (D) pulled the plug on the initial procurement process, which was laden with controversy.

Maryland Matters has learned that an evaluation committee at the Maryland Department of Transportation has recommended granting the contract to URW/Harbor Bankshare, a partnership between the international development company Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield SE and Harbor Bank of Maryland. URW is best known for building and operating shopping centers, including four in Maryland. The Board of Public Works is expected to vote on the recommendation by year’s end.

High-priced government procurements are frequently shrouded in secrecy, and agencies that run them and the companies that bid on the contracts are usually prevented from speaking publicly.

Asked this week to confirm that the agency evaluation committee favored URW/Harbor Bankshare to run all concessions at BWI, and a series of related questions, David Broughton, an MDOT spokesperson, would say only, “This is still an active procurement, and the Maryland Department of Transportation expects to take the item to the Board of Public Works for approval by the end of the year.”

But correspondence obtained by Maryland Matters between the agency and the companies that did not get the nod from MDOT’s screening committee show that URW/Harbor Bankshare was the top choice, “considering both the technical and financial factors set forth” in the state’s call for bids.

Fraport/BWI Partners, the incumbent concessionaire that has held the contract under different corporate names for two decades, was the runner-up, according to the documents, which went out in late August. BWI Experience Partners, a partnership between national airport concessions operator Vantage Airport Group and half a dozen Black entrepreneurs from Maryland, was ranked third. An entity called Asur/RMD BWI JV, which is affiliated with ASUR, a Mexican airport services company, finished fourth.

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is best known for building and operating shopping centers throughout the world, including Westfield-branded malls in Potomac, Wheaton, Hyattsville and Annapolis. It also operates concessions in certain terminals at JFK International Airport in New York, Chicago O’Hare International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport.

The company that is ultimately chosen by the Board of Public Works for this contract will oversee concessions — food, drink, retail and other hospitality services — at BWI for 20 years, working with several leaseholders and subcontractors who operate the stores, restaurants, snack bars and other commercial services at the busy state-owned airport.

But these contract awards are never a done deal until the Board of Public Works votes — and even then there is an appeals process.

While this procurement has yet to produce the controversy of the one that Moore canceled shortly after taking office in 2023, there still appear to be some unanswered questions that may give board members — Moore, Comptroller Brooke Lierman (D) and Treasurer Dereck Davis (D) — some pause.

For one, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, which is based in Paris, signaled in 2021 that it wanted out of the U.S. market, and has been offloading properties ever since, including the Annapolis Mall in August — though it has been reinvesting in certain other developments. Is the company committed to maintaining its U.S. airport contracts? The CEO of URW’s airports division, Dany Nasr, resigned in August after a year and a half on the job.

“This journey has been extraordinary, driven by our mission to uplift the travel experience by placing people at the heart of everything we do,” he wrote to colleagues upon his departure.

BPW members may also want to know why the MDOT evaluation, according to people with knowledge of the process, did not include interviews with the companies or requests for “last and best offers,” a standard practice in procurements. They may want to know who was on the MDOT screening committee. Pointedly, MDOT took the contract decision away from the Maryland Aviation Administration, which operates BWI, and its administrator, Ricky Smith, after Moore canceled the procurement last year.

Additionally, BPW members may want to know whether the Westfield bid was the best for meeting the state’s ambitious Minority Business Enterprise goals, which Moore has made a priority, particularly for state government contracts.

The state initially began advertising for a new concessions operator for the airport in mid-2022, during the administration of former Gov. Larry Hogan (R). The Maryland Aviation Administration, a division of MDOT, put out a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) seeking bids for the contract, which is expected to provide tens of millions of dollars for both the vendor and the state’s coffers.

But as Maryland Matters first reported, the process quickly ran into criticism, after the aviation administration twice changed the RFP in ways that appeared to favor one company — New Market Development Joint Venture LLC, a politically connected firm that was launched just months before the bidding began. One alteration, dealing with the level of experience needed to run concessions at BWI, clearly benefited New Market Development, because the company would not have qualified for the contract without the change.