MUSEUM

hold pending a deal. DiPietro said he supports that idea, but needs his board’s approval.

The lawsuit portrays the county as a sophisticated “bully,” setting up the museum leaders with an “unconscionable” deal in 2006. The lawsuit says the county “knew or should have known” from the beginning that Young At Art “would not have been able to make the annual payments.”

The museum is seeking an injunction to prevent the county from demanding $240,888 the auditor says is owed, and from taking over the museum and its preschool.

The 55,000-square-foot museum opened in 2012, with a Broward County library inside, just east of Flamingo Road and south of Interstate 595, on State Road 84. It is the brainchild of Mindy Shrago, wife of former Broward Judge Jay Spechler. She and her daughter Esther launched it in 1986 as a traveling museum, then settled two years later in a Plantation storefront. Shrago remains the director now. Her son Zack Spechler works as a curator at the museum, DiPietro said.

The county bought the land and fronted the construction cost, and the museum was to pay $11.2 million plus interest over 11 years. But when the recession hit, many museum donors reneged, and the museum couldn’t meet its payments.

In 2014, a new deal was struck, extending the museum’s debts to the county over 37 years. But that deal, too, was unfair, the lawsuit says, and was done “in haste” and under pressure by the county. The new agreement dropped the an- nual payment to $350,000, but said half of donor pledges also had to be turned over to the county. The museum never would have owned the building.

“The county is on an illegal crusade to complete their original intent to have YAA use its funds and resources to create a building and convert it to its own use,” the lawsuit says.

It accuses Cassini of acting improperly as a board member, and takes aim at a consultant who issued a scathing report last year.

“It is an unpleasant lawsuit,” Broward County Attorney Joni Armstrong Coffey said.