Secret deal in Corker lawsuit may involve $775,000 land transfer
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Attorneys in the case did not immediately return telephone calls seeking comment Thursday and Corker campaign spokesman Todd Womack declined comment.
Records at the Hamilton County Register’s Office show that days after the settlement was announced, the Tennessee Environmental Council signed an option to buy 13.4 acres from Pilgrim Congregational Church-United Church of Christ. The council was one of the plaintiffs that filed the lawsuit.
A source familiar with the secret deal told The Commercial Appeal of Memphis that the settlement calls for defendants in the suit to pay for the environmental group’s land acquisition. The specific source of the funds could not be determined.
Corker has said he was prohibited from talking about the settlement, extending a mystery for voters in his race against Democratic U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Memphis. A Ford campaign spokesman has said voters deserve to know if Corker destroyed a city conservation easement “to make millions and then wrote a check to avoid having to tell the truth about it in a deposition.”
The former Chattanooga mayor had been scheduled to give a deposition last week. The secret agreement allowed him to avoid that testimony about decisions made while he was mayor about an access road across a conservation easement for developers to build a Wal-Mart on property his former company sold.
The land deal with the church involves 13.4 acres of woods and meadows in the South Chickamauga watershed that TEC hopes to dedicate for public use.
“It is protecting some of the watershed,” said Sandy Kurtz, a Chattanooga environmental activist and member of the nonprofit council’s board. She declined further comment.
Records filed Monday and signed by Kurtz and allow the environmental council a 45-day option to purchase the land from the church for as much as $775,000. Asked how the environmental group, with $18,924 in assets listed in its most recently available IRS filing, could afford the land, Kurtz told the newspaper, “Keep digging.”
A woman who answered the telephone at the church Thursday said there was no one available to discuss the pending transaction or church’s business affairs. Records show Vanessa Robbs signature for the church, as moderator.
The suit filed in 2003, while Corker was mayor, challenged a road built through a conservation easement that the city was supposed to have kept undeveloped. The suit sought to restore the easement and unspecified money damages.
After Corker’s administration signed off on the deal in 2003, one of his companies sold land for $4.6 million along the road’s route to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter.
Corker has said through a spokesman he wasn’t involved in the development discussions because of a blind trust set up while he was mayor.
His Senate campaign has said he wasn’t named as a defendant, though two of his former companies were. Others named in the suit were Bright Par 3 Associates, Wal-Mart Real Estate Business Trust, DBS Corp. and the city of Chattanooga.
When a judge denied attempts by Corker’s attorneys to delay his Oct. 20 deposition until after the Nov. 7 election, his attorneys tried to withdraw from the case, then reached a settlement agreement.