The land the stadium was to be built on was owned by a Pennsylvania non-profit organization, Northwestern Human Services (NHS), on whose board of trustees Flaherty sat.
The non-profit qualified for a $5 million grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; NHS hoped that its involvement in the stadium would raise its profile in the community and create awareness for its programs.
In the meantime, the construction delay caused the Steam to fold, after playing its sole season in 1999 on various high school fields in the area.
Several lawsuits followed in the wake of the Sports Complex failure, including one brought by Northwestern Human Services itself, against Flaherty and its former president and CEO, Robert C. Panaccio.
The suit claimed that Flaherty and Panaccio used their positions on the board of trustees to influence NHS into gifting the land for the construction of the Sports Complex; it was also alleged that the two hid the fact that Flaherty had no independent ability to pay for the stadium, and that they had secretly been using NHS funds to pay for the construction of the stadium even though they made representations to the other board members that no funds were being used.