text: Cancellation, completion, and opening Significant cost increases led to the project being mothballed by the George H. W. Bush administration. The General Services Administration refused to sign the draft lease, arguing that the building's rental costs were too high and would cost (rather than save) the government $18 million to $24 million a year. Although Pei Cobb Freed agreed to investigate design changes to make the project less costly, at least one member of Congress declared the project dead. In September 1990, the architectural team made changes which cut $82 million from the cost of the building (including the elimination of two theaters, scaling down the reception hall, using plaster rather than stone, substituting aluminum for bronze in the trim, and reducing the size of interior doors), reducing the price tag to $656 million. Delta Partnership, a development consortium led by New York developer William Zeckendorf Jr., was chosen to operate the building and lease it to the government. Another design change came in January 1991, when the number of parking spaces rose by 12.6 percent to 2,500 spaces. But the changes did not resolve the controversies enveloping the project. Design committee member Donald A. Brown quit the committee in late 1991, complaining that the Bush administration was meddling in the project's design. Two days later, Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.'s delegate to Congress, repeated these charges. On January 19, 1992, even as the foundation for the trade center was being dug, the GSA said the building would not achieve financial self-sufficiency. A separate report commissioned by the Bush administration reached similar conclusions. On January 25, 1992, the Bush administration cancelled the international trade center construction project. Days later, a United States district court ruled that Delta Partnership had been chosen in violation of federal contracting guidelines, although the court also refused to overturn the award after finding no bias in the award process. Construction experts decried the decision, saying that the building's costs could balloon to more than $1.2 billion if construction were resumed at a later time.