An arbitration panel here awarded $1 million to the owner of the Spokane Business & Industrial Park for damages it claims the Columbia Lighting division of Orange, Conn.-based Hubbell Lighting Inc. caused or failed to fix when it left the park about a year and a half ago.

The three-lawyer panel, set up as prescribed in Hubbell's lease, issued its final judgment in the matter on May 11 in favor of Park SPE LLC, through which park owner Crown West Realty Inc. leases space to tenants there.

Milt Rowland, Park SPE's attorney, sent Hubbell attorney Susan Azad a letter the following week seeking payment of the award, and said last week that he expected to file a petition in Spokane County Superior Court shortly that would ask the court to order payment of the judgment. Azad couldn't be reached immediately for comment at her Los Angeles office.

Rowland, a former assistant city attorney for the city of Spokane who now is with Seattle-based Foster Pepper PLLC's Spokane office, says such arbitration awards aren't "self-executing," so a Superior Court order is necessary if a party against whom a monetary judgment has been entered declines to pay it voluntarily. "You hope not to have to do that, but Hubble does have the right to challenge" the arbitration panel's ruling, he says.

He adds, though, that, "I think it's essentially bulletproof. The arbitration panel knew what it was doing and weighed the evidence. It certainly was not a one-sided award." The panel granted the industrial park owner hundreds of thousands of dollars less than it had argued it was owed, and, under the law, judicial review of arbitration decisions is quite narrow, he says.

The arbitration panel's judgment includes $715,000 for substantiated damages and $310,000 for attorneys' fees and costs. Hubbell had conceded that Park SPE was entitled to an award of $224,000, but argued that its other claims weren't valid.

The case involves a dispute relating to Columbia Lighting's lease of a large amount of space—ultimately, about 270,000 square feet in three structures—at the Spokane Valley industrial park, at 3808 N. Sullivan, from 1966 to early 2009. Columbia Lighting, a longtime manufacturer of fluorescent light fixtures, at one time employed about 700 people there.

Park SPE claimed that Hubbell breached its lease by failing to restore the structures to their original condition and by causing various types of damage to floors, walls, doors, windows, and lighting and electrical systems that cost Park SPE considerable time and money to fix. Those alleged damages ranged from failing to make or complete certain repairs necessitated by activities that went beyond normal wear and tear, to failing to remove alterations or additions it made during its tenancy there.

For most of the time it leased the space, which included three lease extensions, Columbia Lighting had a contractual right to leave approved alterations or modifications in place there, or to remove them, when its lease ended, the arbitration decision says. That option was deleted, though, in a contract addendum approved in 2007 and thus wasn't available to the lighting company when it vacated the space in early 2009. A separate addendum added in 2007 required the lighting company to leave the space "broom clean with all damage from occupancy and vacation repaired."

Rowland says that about six months before Hubbell moved out of the space, representatives of the park owner did a walk-through with Hubbell representatives "and pointed out a large number of items that needed to be corrected. Those things almost invariably get negotiated. If they had bargained, the lessor (Park SPE) would have given some ground."

Hubbell didn't do that, though, he says, perhaps partly because it was in the midst of an operational restructuring. Later, after Hubbell's attorneys got more involved, "We were simply unable to get any movement out of them," he says.

Hubbell announced in July 2008 that it would close the longtime Columbia Lighting plant by Dec. 31 of that year. It said the Spokane Valley plant's then 213 workers would receive severance packages and in some instances would receive help in finding new jobs.

Hubbell purchased the assets of Columbia Lighting in 2002 for $250 million, and had made clear then that the Spokane plant's work eventually would go away, due partly to its distance from Hubbell's eastern U.S. operations.

Before that transaction, Columbia Lighting had claimed to be the nation's third-largest maker of commercial, industrial, and residential fluorescent-light fixtures. It was part of Birmingham, Ala.-based Lighting Corporation of America (LCA). LCA, in turn, was part of huge U.S. Industries Inc., of Iselin, N.J. Columbia Lighting was founded here in 1898.