Opinion ID: 667573
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Failure to Present the Whole Record

Text: 46 Saratoga also protests that the PADC did not present the whole record to the district court for review. Cf. 5 U.S.C. Sec. 702; Overton Park, 401 U.S. at 419-20, 91 S.Ct. at 825. By statute, the PADC was required to consult with the GSA and with the International Cultural and Trade Center Commission (which represented the prospective tenants of the Federal Triangle building) before selecting the winning developer. 40 U.S.C. Sec. 1104(a)(2). Both the GSA and the Commission had technical reports prepared on the various proposals to enable them to perform their advisory roles. Saratoga infers that these reports contained some criticisms of Delta's proposal, because the GSA and the Commission both decided to recommend BPT Properties as the winning developer. The administrative record, however, does not contain these reports. Nor does it contain the report prepared by the District of Columbia government, which gave Saratoga and BPT its highest rating and put Delta into the next tier. J.A. 241. On the basis of these facts, Saratoga suggests that the PADC has skew[ed] the record to exclude information from its own files that is pertinent and integral to the process by which the decision was reached. Appellant's Opening Brief at 39. 47 There appears no support for this claim of a rigged record. The administrative record in fact contains the GSA's letter recommending BPT to the PADC, see A.R. tab 36; nothing obliged the GSA to transmit the underlying technical reports to the PADC, and the government assures us that it never did so. As for the Commission, the administrative record contains both its recommendation of BPT and its descriptive evaluation reports, see A.R. tab 37; again, the PADC evidently never saw the technical reports. Nor did the D.C. government send its report to the PADC. See Federal Appellees' Brief at 42-43. In sum, the PADC did not exclude these reports from the record that it gave to the district court, for the simple reason that they were never part of the record in the first place; they were neither prepared for nor provided to the PADC 8 or its staff. 48 Saratoga counters that if the PADC did not consider these materials, its decision may well have been arbitrary. Appellant's Opening Brief at 39. This is a complete non sequitur. Over the course of the four months between the deadline for submissions and the selection of the winning developer, the PADC's staff pored over the proposals with the help of specially retained experts, and then submitted its evaluations to the Corporation. The possibility that the PADC might have chosen another developer if it had been relying on, say, the GSA's staff instead of its own surely does not make its decision arbitrary; Congress entrusted the ultimate selection decision to the PADC, not the GSA.