The potential dismissal of a civil case between the former Greenbrier Valley Airport Director Stephen Snyder versus the Greenbrier County Commission and Airport Authority will be considered near the end of this month.
According to the complaint, in 2015 Snyder began investigating a “former GCAA manager and former chief financial officer,” allegedly “improperly abused their positions and misused GCAA funding and property to their own financial gain” and “numerous instances of potential waste, fraud, and wrongdoing involving” a Greenbrier County Commission member.
The initial complaint filed in May lays out three counts Snyder seeks to have heard by a jury:
– Count one is a “whistle-blower claim” stating he was fired due to “repeated, good faith reports to [the commission and Airport
Authority] of instances of wrongdoing and waste.” Later dismissal filings by the plaintiff and defense call any claim to whistle-blower protections into question due a time restriction needed to make the claim, a restriction that was changed by the Legislature in 2020.
– Count two is a Harless claim stating the terminations was done in retaliation for these reports.
– Count three is “the intentional infliction of emotional distress,” stating that the “termination was intended by design by the
defendants to be extremely embarrassing and as a form of punishment and retaliation.”
According to the complaint, Snyder raised concerns about a County Commissioner, including:
– Allegations that a company owned by a board member and county commissioner improperly used his position to rent buildings owned and operated by the Airport Authority for rates “greatly below fair market values.”
– That a commissioner “potentially contaminated soil and groundwater” pursuant to business activities during the lease, in violation of WV environmental law.
– That a company owned by a commissioner failed to pay taxes.
– That a board member and commissioner “illegally transferred, without compensation, 15.95 acres of GCAA property to the Greenbrier County Economic Development Office, which ultimately results in the County Commission being required … to repay the [FAA] for the property.”
– That a company owned by a board member and commissioner received “lucrative contracts for airport construction projects from the GCAA and failed, at times, to perform said projects to a reasonable standard of acceptable workmanship.”
On June 23, the commission filed a response to the complaint, both denying many of Snyder’s allegations and stating Snyder “fails to state a claim against this defendant upon which relief may be granted.” The response also states Snyder “is without sufficient information or knowledge to form a belief as to the truth of the statements and allegations.”
Although the lawsuit does not specify the county commissioner, Snyder has previously called attention to similar allegations against Commission President Lowell Rose.
“He’s made these allegations for the last two or three years, ever since he’s been turned loose from the airport,” Rose told The West Virginia Daily News. “There’s nothing to them. They’ve been investigated like 40 times by state police, IRS, everybody, and everybody has thrown it out. … It’s all against the airport authority, but it’s things that happened 10, 15, 20 years ago. It’s just a vendetta-type thing in my book.”
HISTORY
Prior to Snyder’s termination, Greenbrier County representatives were divided over a policy affecting the Greenbrier Valley Airport and the Greenbrier County Convention and Visitors Bureau (GCCVB), an organization dedicated to attracting tourists to the area.
Snyder and Commissioner Mike McClung pushed for the creation of a second CVB for the Greenbrier Valley Airport to provide funding for the creation of new flights. A bed tax increase from 3% to 6% was proposed, with Snyder later telling The West Virginia Daily News it had the support to pass, but it was never brought to a vote. In late 2018, Jim Justice, governor and owner of The Greenbrier, told McClung, Rose, and former commissioner Woody Hanna, he would close the resort, the county’s largest employer, for half the year and that he would “ruin the three of us and run us out of the county” if the plan moved forward, according to Rose.
Rose and newly-elected Tammy Shifflett-Tincher opposed the creation of a new CVB, saying the GCCVB could be used as a pass through in order to expand flights. Snyder and McClung felt the funds, if left with the GCCVB, could be reallocated to things other than air service if not under the direct control of the airport staff or authority.
Snyder highlights that, in order to have the needed votes to remove him, the commission needed to remove McClung from the Authority and remove Lowell Johnson from his position as chair of the Authority. On March 28, 2019, when McClung was removed from the Airport Authority and replaced by Tincher.
“[GVVA Chairman Lowell] Johnson, Commissioner [McClung], and Snyder tried to push through a CVB for the airport, which I’d asked them to drop many times, and they refused until it was finally brought to the floor and voted down,” said Rose at the time.
“They continually do things that Commissioner Tincher and I don’t approve of, and have voiced our opinion about, but it falls on deaf ears. … We have had concerns with some of the things that have [gone] on with the airport. I would not in any way say that Mr. Snyder hasn’t done a good job with the maintenance of the airport and several aspects of the airport. He has.”
In the same meeting, McClung noted “this action is not about appointing a new county commission representative to the airport authority board. It is about removing me from the board and further it is about having the required votes on the authority to remove the airport director.”
On June 18, 2019, the Greenbrier County Airport Authority voted three to two to remove Snyder effective immediately. Boardmembers Deborah Phillips, Greg Furlong, and Tincher voted in favor, while Lowell Johnson and Mike Rose voted against.
Speaking in public comment after his removal, Snyder cited multiple issues that he believes led to his removal, including frequent accusations of overspending, and noted his best intentions in running the airport for the benefit of the community. A month later, Snyder gave public comment to the commission.
“You all knew from the very beginning … that if you felt I wasn’t serving the people of this region in a proper manner, that you could ask me to leave at any time, and I would have done so with no fuss and no muss,” said Snyder. “But you didn’t elect to do that. You terminated an airport manager with no notice, with thousands of documents in a computer and nobody knows where they are. No one knows how to take custody of them. … Do not put this airport at risk for your own lack of a better plan for a logical transition.”
After public comment, Rose stated “I’m not going to engage in a back and forth dispute. I do not agree with 99 percent of that statement.”
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS?
The suit references multiple criminal investigations into the airport. A case was opened by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) before June 2016, after receiving information from Snyder. However, Tessa Cooper, a victim specialist with the FBI, confirmed their role in the investigation was over in a letter provided to the Mountain Messenger, addressed to Snyder and dated September 1, 2017. The letter reads the “investigation has been closed because the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) has declined to prosecute.”
According to the complaint, a case was opened with the West Virginia State Auditor’s Office Public Integrity and Fraud Unit Investigator. The lawsuit explains that “prior to [Snyder’s] meeting to turn over custody all evidence to the WVSAO Public Integrity and Fraud Unit Investigator, [Snyder] was terminated by a three to two vote of the GCAA Board with no reason given by the board except that he was an ‘at-will’ employee.”
On the county level, both sides of the lawsuit have referenced an alleged investigation with a special prosecutor in Fayette County. For example, Commissioner Mike McClung stated he was delivering evidence to a special prosecutor when he took “hard drive, two file folders, and a CD” from the airport, the incident that led to the criminal charges filed against him in January 2020.
To date, a special prosecutor related to Snyder’s reports has not been independently confirmed by The West Virginia Daily News through a prosecutor’s office. However, the alleged case is the foundation for several claims in Snyder’s civil complaint directly against Commission President Lowell Rose. During an executive session on January 15, 2019, of the Airport Authority, Snyder expressed frustration that a county-level investigation “appeared” to have “stalled.” After this, “Rose spoke about the investigation as though he had first-hand experience and advocated, in opposition to [Snyder’s] position, for closure of the investigation as too hard to prosecute and claimed that the statute of limitation presented problems.”
In response, Rose told The West Virginia Daily News “the only thing I told them there is [that] I agreed with him. Yeah, there may have been things that weren’t [properly] done 10, 15 years prior to that, but they’ve been investigated and the IRS, everybody, said there’s nothing to prosecute. There’s nothing there. In the meeting, I said ‘guys, you’re just burning up time and money. Just let it go and move on with life and the business of the airport.’ That’s all I told them.”
The suit states “later it was learned [by Snyder] that the state trooper appointed to assist the Fayette County Prosecuting Attorney to investigate the defendants possibly had a social relationship with the County Commissioners as it was rumored he was planning to marry into his family.”
“My daughter has been dating a state trooper who was told to investigate,” Rose told The West Virginia Daily News. “[He was] a second trooper, second or third one, and he … told the state police that he was … dating my daughter, and they’re not married. They’re not engaged or anything, but they’re still dating. … They told him that it was not a conflict to go on. That question was asked and answered [by] the state police, and they told him he could investigate it. There’s nothing there.”
Although not a criminal case, Snyder also filed a complaint relating to the airport and his concerns to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Airport Authority has continued to follow up on FAA inquiries since the complaint was filed, often meeting in executive session to discuss the issue.
In the first Authority meeting of 2022, after a motion from Tincher and a second from Furlong, the board voted to “take steps and actions to prepare and submit a corrective action plan to the FAA.”
Airport Authority Chair Deborah Phillips previously told the Mountain Messenger “to our knowledge, we have not done anything that we believe has violated any state or federal law.”
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
On July 2, the Airport Authority filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The filing lists several reasons for potential dismissal. For example, the whistle-blower claim “is barred by the applicable statute of limitations,” as State Code notes a 180 period for “injunctive relief or damages” for this type of suit. As a result, the suit should have been filed before December 16, 2019, instead of May 2021.
On August 30, Snyder responded to the motion to dismiss, noting “this claim is time-barred under the original statute of limitation period of 180 days instead of the two year … period now provided for pursuant to our state’s Legislative 2020 amendments” to the State Code, amid other defenses. The defendants later stated, in another filing, that the new State Code timeline was not intended to be retroactive to before the law change was passed.
After another round of legal arguments were filed, a motions hearing was set for late January to consider if the case would be dismissed
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