Cunningham makes effort to settle Children's Home dispute

By Joel Davis
of The Daily Times Staff

County Mayor Jerry Cunningham said Friday he has offered to settle a recent legal dispute with the Blount County Children’s Home Board of Directors. For its part, the Board of Directors has set a March 10 called meeting to discuss the situation.

“(Attorney) Rob Goddard and I have put our heads together and have sent to (the board’s attorney) Amy Burroughs and her clients an offer of settlement, like the commission told us to do,” Cunningham said. “I’m not comfortable giving (details) out because it’s in the negotiation process and the board hasn’t had a chance to look at it.”

Terry Elmore, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Blount County Children’s Home, said the board will prepare a response to the offer, but in the interim will be working on correcting issues with its charter.

“We’re wanting to concentrate on getting our charter amendment passed so we can continue to offer needed services in the community,” Elmore said. “We’re just hoping the County Commission will support our charter amendment.”

Elmore did provide a copy of Cunningham’s proposal to The Daily Times. The terms of the settlement would lead to the reduction of the number of directors from 15 to nine and would ensure the county mayor made future appointments to the board. It also proposes changing the purpose of the Children’s Home corporation to “provide services, as agreed between the board and the commission, to children and youth under age 18 to enable them to reach their full potential. Services offered by the corporation shall be given to only Blount County residents.”

Settlement details

Under the settlement, the Children’s Home would deed 9.1 acres back to Blount County while the county would lease the portion of the property currently used by the Children’s Home back to the organization at no cost for 30 years.

The Children’s Home currently operates as Homegrown Family Outreach and is home to Operation Success and Gardner Place, a supervised visitation and peaceful exchange program. It stopped hosting children long-term in 2003 when children in group homes across the state were moved into foster homes in 2003 as a result of a lawsuit.

In a Feb. 5 letter to Elmore, Cunningham brought several legal issues to light, including a invalid charter change, made without permission from the Blount County Commission, that expanded the number of directors for the Children’s Home. The letter also brought a 2005 warranty deed, signed by former County Mayor Beverley Woodruff and concerning a portion of the Children’s Home property, into question.
“Evidently, my predecessor Beverley Woodruff signed a warranty deed attempting to convey property to the Children’s Home,” Cunningham wrote. “However, this was done without any resolution by the Blount County Commission as is legally required in order to transfer property.”

The warranty deed does cite a Dec. 16, 2004, vote by the commission, but the minutes of that meeting indicate that commissioners voted to have the documents prepared — not executed.

“It never came back (to the commission) and was one of those things that nobody ever picked up on it,” Cunningham said. “A deed was prepared by someone and Mayor Woodruff signed it. She may have assumed a resolution had been passed, but the law is you have to have a resolution before any mayor is empowered to deed over county property. That is a fatal flaw. The other fatal flaw is there is a reversion clause in that deed if they don’t keep children at the home.”

Lack of cooperation

The dispute between Cunningham and the Children’s Home board seems to have originated in what he describes as a lack of cooperation on the idea of creating an adult and children’s services campus, including the Helen Ross McNabb Center and Children’s Advocacy organization, on a portion of the Children’s Home property.
“Absolutely,” Cunningham said. “It was an attitude that just astounded me. I didn’t understand it at all.”

According to Elmore, however, the board is perfectly willing to cooperate but wants to choose what is best for the Children’s Home.

“We’ve always had that idea of a campus-type setting, it’s just that the board wants to be responsible for choosing what is, or what is not a good fit,” Elmore said. “That’s what you appoint boards for. We want to be the entity that makes decisions on the property that is deeded to the Children’s Home. Whatever the county wants to do with the other part, we’ve never had a problem with that.”

In a Feb. 19 reply to Cunningham’s letter, Elmore provided more details about the board’s response.

“At the heart of the issue was the county asking the BCCH Board to deed part of their property to the county to allow Helen Ross McNabb and New Hope Advocacy Center to construct new facilities and also provide additional space for another unknown future facility,” Elmore wrote. “When approached by any agency who wishes to partner or utilize BCCH property, our primary attraction and inquiry is how ‘specifically’ would we be able to work together programmatically and would this partnership address the mission of the BCCH. The BCCH has never received any written proposal, documentation, or information from any agency that you have promoted that addressed these and other concerns. As a compromise, and at your request during our November 2007 board meeting, we submitted a land swap proposal during a gathering on December 12, 2007, at your office that included deeding part of the BCCH property back to the county in order to provide space for these two agencies. The proposal was turned down and no counter offer was made.”
Cunningham denied allegations that have been made during public comments concerning commercial interests in the property.

“There are blatantly false accusations that this whole thing is designed to allow developers access to that property,” he said. “That just simply is not the case. As long as I’m the mayor, I will fight for that entire acreage, including the Children’s Home, to only be used for a children and adults services campus for Blount County citizens and residents.”

Blount County Commission Vice Mayor Steve Samples said he wants to give the mayor and the board time to work out the problem.

“Both sides are wanting to work out the problems,” he said. “I wanted to give them a chance to work those problems out and then come back to the commission with a proposal.”

Cunningham said he wants to ensure that the Children’s Home only provides services for local residents.

“The commission and I don’t want to put the Children’s Home out of business, but we don’t want it encompassing a 15-county area. Other counties need to provide services for people in their own counties.”