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Downtown Waynesville Association narrowly survives contentious hearing
BY CORY VAILLANCOURT POLITICS E DITOR he Downtown Waynesville Association has been in the fight of its 36-year political life since Waynesville aldermen refused to renew the group’s contract back in June, but after a highly unusual special called meeting on Aug. 12 where the DWA narrowly avoided the death penalty, aldermen have decided to give the beleaguered organization yet another chance, putting the group on life support for 90 days. Founded in 1985, the Downtown Waynesville Association administers the Town of Waynesville’s Municipal Service District (MSD) and directs revitalization activities. It’s funded largely through an additional property tax levied on properties in the district. The DWA’s longtime executive director, Buffy Phillips, had recently come under scrutiny for a litany of management, performance and transparency concerns and barely survived an attempt to remove her from the position in 2018. With the expiration of the DWA’s five-year contract imminent, Waynesville aldermen held a public comment session on April 27 to gather community input regarding the organization’s performance. It was there that a group of concerned business owners said it would compete with the DWA through the RFP process for the right to manage the MSD. That group later disappeared, but the problems raised by the group didn’t, so Alderman Anthony Sutton requested five years’ worth of the group’s public records — financial statements, meeting notes and other documents that state law requires public bodies to retain. Sutton’s request largely mirrors a public records request made by The Smoky Mountain News more than a month prior. Then, as now, SMN’s request has gone unfulfilled. That meeting also revealed confusion as to whether or not the executive director had announced her retirement; a story published in The Mountaineer on March 27 said Phillips had made the announcement at the DWA’s most recent meeting. Phillips didn’t return multiple calls from SMN seeking confirmation, and when board members Leigh Forrester, Olivia Carver and chair Carolyn Brunk were reached, they refused to comment on Phillips’ status. In June, aldermen revealed that the DWA was the only group to submit a proposal to manage the MSD, but the proposal was riddled with incomplete sentences as well as inaccurate and outdated information, including listing a board member who was deceased, an elected official who had been voted out of office more than 18 months prior, and letters of support from 2016. The proposal did, however, include Phillips’ resignation letter. 6 Sutton made clear that the proposal was
Smoky Mountain News
August 18-24, 2021
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Waynesville Town Manager Rob Hites (center) joins Waynesville aldermen at an Aug. 10 meeting. Cory Vaillancourt photo insufficient when he addressed the board that night. “I have lots of questions about the proposal, also the fact that I still haven’t received all the minutes that were requested,” Sutton said. “I would propose that we do a joint meeting of the entire board of aldermen and [DWA] officers and that we prepare questions and have them readily available for the executive staff to answer at the time of the meeting, because right now I do not feel comfortable proceeding with negotiations with them, as is.” That’s what brought the board of aldermen together with some of the DWA’s board on Wednesday, Aug. 12, at the Waynesville Recreation Center, where Sutton started out with a scathing review of the documents he had been able to obtain from the DWA. Grasping a thick binder with dozens of colorful post-it notes hanging off its edges, Sutton launched into a scathing summary of what he’d found — or rather, not found — within it. He began by asking the most basic questions of the board. Who’s on the board? How many are on the board? How often do you meet? What’s your quorum? Brunk, owner of the Oak Park Inn and chair of the DWA’s executive board, replied with a series of conflicting answers and a general lack of knowledge over who, exactly, was or is on the group’s board.
Sutton asked when the last time the board met, because he hadn’t received meeting minutes since at least April. He also asked about the search committee responsible for hiring the new executive director, and the number of people the group had interviewed. First, the answer was zero, then it was one, then, two. Brunk also said that she’d received three resumes in the last week, but hadn’t yet interviewed them. “Until we have a contract it’s really hard to bring someone in,” Brunk said, noting that without assurance the group would even be in existence in the coming months, some candidates were reticent to apply. Sutton then directed his attention to the meeting minutes in his binder, which he said were “rife with inaccuracies,” noting issues that were raised in meetings that were never followed up on (including an executive director succession plan), minutes from meetings approved by board members who weren’t present at the meeting for which minutes were being approved, and a missing financial audit for 2019 that wasn’t completed until 2020. “It’s been the last year-and-a-half to two years that things have been slipping,” Brunk told Sutton. Brunk’s been on the board for years, and became chair last year. Brunk said specifically in response to document requests made by The Smoky Mountain News that she went into the DWA’s office, expecting to find the records readily at
hand, and discovered they weren’t there. The DWA is a public body subject to the same public records and open meetings laws as municipal governing boards, says Frayda Bluestein, the David M. Lawrence Distinguished Professor of Public Law and Government at the School of Government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In North Carolina, the remedy for a public records request that isn’t fulfilled is in a court of law, and guidance provided by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources says that records of the sort that have been requested by Sutton and SMN — meeting minutes, agenda packets and the like — are to be retained permanently by the custodial organization. Statutes also provide criminal penalties for the destruction of records, which could mean trouble for the DWA if they’re not available for production. Board members can also be held personally liable. “As a board you have a responsibility to know what is going on in your organization and get that info to us regularly,” Sutton told Brunk. Reading from North Carolina General Statutes, Sutton said that the DWA has to account, very specifically, for how it spends its money, and that he’d seen no accounting whatsoever — another violation of state statute. Although many members professed a
