The owner of Global Green Lighting denied that he "stole" $5.59 million of $6.1 million in street lights sold to the city.
Don Lepard said he was falsely portrayed as taking the lights without permission.
He said he had permission from then-City Attorney Wade Hinton to retrieve the lights that had been placed in a Main Street warehouse after EPB said they were faulty and would not continue using them.
Mr. Lepard said City Auditor Stan Sewell should publicly apologize to him.
He said the City Council should investigate why Attorney Hinton never told the City Council that Mr. Lepard had been told he could go get the lights.
The Chattanooga-based lighting official said Mayor Andy Berke had his mind made up to reject the lighting contract before he took office.
Mr. Lepard, who is represented by attorney Buddy Presley, wrote this letter to the City Council:
Chairman Henderson, Members of Council:
We are writing to the Council for purposes of disputing the conclusions Stan Sewell reached in the OIA’s memorandum report of July 2, 2020, relating to Global Green Lighting and the accusatory tone that Global Green Lighting Company of illegally took possession of the street light inventory from the City-owned Main Street warehouse and CDOT storage lot. Pursuant to a valid agreement, “GGL did have the right to take possession of the City’s light fixtures being stored and located at those two facilities.”
I am asking the City Council to act on the following:
• Officially charge me of a crime and let me defend myself using only the truthful facts, or
• Ask the right questions, review the facts in the attached timeline showing GGL operated under the authority of the former City Attorney Wade Hinton and direct Mr. Sewell to publicly retract and apologize for the statement in the audit, which was leaked to the media, and/or
• Ask the State Comptroller and/or the TBI to conduct an official government audit and investigation to review how and why Wade Hinton and Mayor Andy Berke used $6 million of City’s assets to pay for a three way Global Settlement Agreement between the City EPB and GGL that was never brought to the Council for its approval.
The simple truth is that Wade Hinton knew we were removing the inventory, something he denies in Mr. Sewell’s OIA report. It is a fact that, a GGL representative talked with Mr. Hinton or his office on the morning of June 13, 2018, as we began removing the inventory to request Mr. Hinton send someone with a key to open the secured CDOT storage lot. It is a fact the Chattanooga Furniture Bank’s Program Director Danny Ayala, a City employee in charge at the main street warehouse, said in an affidavit, that he “called the City Attorney's office and spoke to Mr. Hinton's assistant. He told her “Mr. Lepard was here with signed documentation to remove the lights from our location, but they needed a key for the CDOT lot across the street and to possibly send someone”. He was placed on hold for a moment, “when the assistant came back, she said it was okay for them to proceed and would send someone down to open the CDOT gate.” Council should know that Mr. Ayala was told last Tuesday that the City was defunding the Chattanooga Furniture Bank warehouse and that he would have to vacate the main street warehouse with no other options for relocating. In other words, the City quietly retaliated against a Danny Ayala after submitting his affidavit, defending GGL.
At no point along the trail of communications that morning or any time after that did Mr. Hinton inform GGL that the City Council had not approved the global settlement with GGL the night before, an action he had said in a previous email would take place. The truth is that Mr. Hinton knew GGL was removing the inventory and has known it for two years. Mr. Hinton also knew the City Council approval was a formality, but it was Mr. Hinton added requirement to seek the Council’s approval.
As a member of Council, you have to ask these questions:
• Mr. Hinton avoided having to ask the City Council for a $144,262 settlement payment to be made to GGL for the contractual obligations to pay for the lighting infrastructure to the end of 2017 because he had previously had the Council declare dysfunctional in order to take them down. Were the lights really dysfunctional each time Mr. Hinton and Mayor Berke told you they were?
• Why would Wade Hinton seek the council’s approval to use $6 million (book value) of the City’s assets to pay for a three-way Global Settlement agreement between the City, EPB and GGL? The timeline shows that the settlement occurred to stop discovery in litigation where the City had failed to pay $144,262 it was contractually obligated to pay, primarily because Mr. Hinton and Mayor Berke had earlier declared the GGL Street Lights to be dysfunctional. How then, could he come ask the Council for the money for GGL streetlights that allegedly did not work?
• If the Council was too busy to discuss the payment of a $6 million settlement on June 12, 2018, then why was it not presented the next week, or the next or in any week since?
• Why did the City’s finance department transfer the previously declared dysfunctional streetlight inventory to the Capital Asset Budget to begin the depreciation cycle on July 25, 2018? That occurred just two days after GGL completed the removal of the inventory on July 23, 2018 … 40 days and 25 tractor trailer loads later … but Mr. Sewell would have you believe no one at the City knew. Could it be that the Berke Administration never brought the settlement agreement to the Council because it knew the OIA would investigate why the assets were on its Capital Asset schedule but not in the City’s possession, and at that point GGL would look complicit? That is how you get to statement from Mr. Sewell that says, “GGL did not have the right to take
possession of the City’s light fixtures.”
Accusing GGL of theft is just the latest deception in a lengthy line of lies that the Berke Administration told the City Council starting in 2013 because Mayor Berke entered office with the intention of ending a project started by the previous administration and one that was fiercely opposed by the EPB’s Harold DePriest. With the passage of time, the facts that never change shine a clear light on the deception and lies of the Berke administration in its dealings with GGL. The attached timeline, while lengthy and supported by documentation, is something that paints a factual picture of the relationship between
Mayor Berke, GGL and what was one of most praised startups in Chattanooga’s history as an entrepreneurial city. For reasons members can only explain, Council members have accepted and questioned the deceptions of Mayor Berke. The OIA report is just the latest tool used to mislead Council members.
It is no longer even plausible to deny that Mayor Berke intended to get rid of the GGL lighting program before he ever took office. The facts say so. Described as a disgruntled vendor, I had no choice than to do whatever I could to defend the integrity of GGL’s product, employees and my lifetime of achievement in Chattanooga by presenting the undisputable evidence of the EPB and Mayor Berke’s alleged wrong doings to anyone with authority who was willing to listen. Keep in mind, the first two lawsuits were dismissed based on Government Immunity and not on the merits of the case. The third lawsuit could not be dismissed based on immunity, and like most lawyers will say, you can’t have a settlement agreement if you do not have a solid case to settle. That is how and why we reached the place of a three-way Global Settlement Agreement with the City, EPB and GGL.
From the beginning, the Berke administration fabricated data and facts to fit the Mayor’s narrative of the GGL lighting project, whether it was performance-based or financial. The administration then used faulty reports generated by former COO Jeff Cannon, current CDOT Director Blyth Bailey, former Deputy COO David Carmody and former City Attorney Mr. Wade Hinton intended to deceive the Council and to mislead local media outlets, all afraid to report on the story because of the power of the EPB advertising budget. Again, the timeline will point those times along the way where the Council was given inaccurate information in order to influence a decision at Council. Those of you who were on Council in May 2014 will remember the report Mayor Berke used to defund Phase II of the lighting project, two months after all nine members of Council sent a letter recommending Phase II be funded.
There is a reason that I never felt comfortable refurbishing the lights since taking what Mr. Sewell implies is illegal possession of the inventory, and that is because I knew that the City finance department still had the $6,000,000 of GGL street lights on their books as depreciating/disappearing capital assets. I knew at some point this would become a legal issue, but I never thought it would take two years before Mr. Sewell’s report confirmed my instincts that issues with Mayor Berke were not finished and the truth would come out before he left the office of Mayor of Chattanooga.
The context and clarity that time provides shows that despite years of Mayor Berke trying to cancel the streetlight program based on excessive cost, performance or reliability, it finally took a loophole in the contract to legally terminate the contract on the fifth try on February 29, 2016. That loophole was created by Mayor Berke defunding Phase II of the light program in May 2014. The bottom line is the GGL streetlights were in good working condition until the day the City contracted the EPB to take them down in 2017, a fact documented in a signed affidavit from Mr. Bailey dated October 24, 2017 that was given as part of a court proceeding.
For an administration and Council that profess a commitment to transparency, an examination of the record, including the legal record, by a credible third party would show that the deliberate attempt to destroy a private business was the exact opposite of transparency. The media is incapable of pursuing truth, and my hope is that this Council will do this on behalf of the taxpayers. It is the taxpayers who have lost because of the millions of dollars in material, energy savings and local jobs that the lighting program would have provided and the reality that the City has returned to its model of paying too much every month for streetlights. This was evident in March 2016 when Mr. Hinton literally altered a bid process in order not to award a bid on new streetlights to Smart City Management, a company owned by GGL Holding. Mr. Hinton pulled the bid, gave control of the streetlights back to EPB and ordered them to remove the metered smart lights and replace them with new streetlights at a 30% higher cost.
It would be the right thing to do for whoever our next mayor may be. For me, as a Chattanooga businessman who never succumbed to the corruption of Mayor Berke, seeing accountability in local government and defending GGL’s integrity is more important to me than the millions in value the streetlights hold today.
I look forward to answering any questions you may have, under oath if you would like. I have abided by the non-disparagement clause of the settlement I signed with the City and EPB. It allows me to refute any new allegations made against GGL, and that is what I have done here. The City, by leaking the audit report to the media, broke the settlement agreement … the one the Berke administration agreed to and then never brought back to the governing body for approval.
It will not surprise me if the administration tries to discuss this behind closed doors in executive session with the Council. I would urge you not to do that given the public nature of the OIA report and the public history with the project. If you believe in transparency, discuss the OIA report in public. When you do, ask whether or not Mr. Hinton and Mayor Berke had the authority to barter a settlement using a City asset? That is exactly what they did, no matter what the OIA’s final report says.
There is nothing to be done about the company that moved a factory from China to Chattanooga TN or its 60 employees that Mayor Berke sacrificed for his own political purposes. I refer you back to the requests at the beginning of this letter and ask that the Council do the right thing.