Taxpayers, hold on to your seats and wallets.... 

Looks like the bumpy "on again off again" relationship between Hoboken and ROBOTIC, the operators of the automated parking garage, is heading to Federal Court. 

Published reports indicate that Hoboken has brought in  Unitronics, Inc., an Israel based company with offices in Quincy, MA to operate the troubled garage. 

The problem is that while Hoboken owns the building and equipment, Robotic owns the software, a situation that you would have expected to have been addressed when Hoboken entered into the agreement.

Robotic plans to file legal action in federal court seeking both civil and criminal penalties for allowing the city to bring another company in to copy trade secrets and fears that “They may be sending what they are copying out of the country to people elsewhere to be reverse engineered so they have the ability to run it without having to pay software fees. If they get away with this, then (Bill) Gates is at risk.”

With just ten months to the May, 2007 City Council elections, there had to be a better way to resolve the problem....