Nonprofit Rebuts Dam Litigation Claims, as New Albany Mayor Continues to Withhold Legal Costs

NEW ALBANY, in. (WAVE) – As New Albany’s mayor continues to refuse to reveal the cost of the Providence Mill Dam litigation, one of his litigants is pushing back.

Southern Indiana nonprofit River Heritage Conservancy and Ecosystems Connections Institute received a permit from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources for removal of the Providence Mill Dam in 2021. New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan continues to refuse to tell the city how much money has been spent in the legal battle with the nonprofit to block the dam’s removal.

The nonprofit said the dam removal has been an “additional pilot project” to the Origin Park they are already building.

“Our vision is to create a park, a public park, that will connect the communities of Jeffersonville, Clarksville, New Albany and southern Indiana and, frankly, will reach all the way to Louisville when it’s all said and done,” Dennis Schnurbusch said. , executive director of RHC.

But one community has pushed back every step of the way: the city of New Albany.

In a recent letter to city council members, Mayor Jeff Gahan writes his reasons for refusing to disclose the cost of three years of litigation to block the River Heritage Conservancy’s removal of the Silver Creek dam. .

Chief among the reasons is Origin Park, a project the mayor says will privatize public lands.

“I think what bothers me most about that statement is that it introduces misinformation as a deliberate scare tactic regarding what we’re doing,” Schnurbusch said.

RHC leaders say the park has nothing to do with their litigation with the city. Just the removal of the dam, a separate project, is what the legal battle is about.

However, Mayor Gahan primarily referenced Origin Park and how he believes it will negatively impact New Albany, in an effort to defend his position of not disclosing the total spent in the litigation with RHC. The majority of the New Albany City Council passed a resolution in September asking the mayor to release litigation costs before the budget vote.

“Premature disclosure of these costs could potentially compromise the City’s legal position and hamper its ability to negotiate or litigate effectively. “I therefore respectfully urge the Council to defer any action regarding the disclosure of litigation expenses until the matter has been fully resolved.”

In his letter, Gahan made several claims about the project, along with the accusation that it would privatize public lands, stating that it would be a “disservice to the people of New Albany.”

“If anything, the city of New Albany and other cities in the region will benefit from this project,” Schnurbusch said. “I mean we estimate that up to $2 million people will visit the park annually. This will mean jobs, visitors and hotel stays. “I don’t know what that looks like and it is said that it is going to harm the residents of this area.”

He referred to RHC as a “private out-of-county corporation,” to which RHC responded that they are a nonprofit organization made up of board members who are residents of both Floyd and Clark counties.

Gahan also alleged that a fee would be charged for access to public lands and Silver Creek if the park were built. RHC has also denied this. They said the park is made up of land they purchased or have a memorandum of understanding with the property owner to manage and maintain it without paying a fee to enter the park. The fees would only apply to optional “opportunity” parts of the park, which they said would help the park sustain itself.

“This is public land. We have an agreement with the city of Clarksville on how it will be operated,” Schnurbusch said. “There has never been any intention to charge for Silver Creek. That’s always been a free thing. It doesn’t belong to us. “It belongs to the community.”

RHC leaders said any effort to include New Albany in their plans had failed. Now that the litigation is underway, what happens to the Suce dam will depend on the courts.

“We are at a point where we are diametrically opposed. Either he stays or he goes. We say yes,” Lanum said. “Assuming everything goes as planned, whether we take down the dam or it has to stay for whatever reason. The original park will continue to exist. I mean, it’s 430 acres on two miles of the Ohio River with no commercial traffic. “We are building that no matter what.”

IDNR and the US Army Corps of Engineers They are also involved in litigation with the city after Gahan ordered emergency work to be held at the dam earlier this month after numerous incidents in the area, including the drowning of 14-year-old AJ Edwards Jr. on Memorial Day. In early August, the mayor filled the base of the dam with rocks in an action that officials said was illegal. Litigation with IDNR continues in court in February.

While the mayor has refused to release the cost of the litigation, the nonprofit has released the cost to them: $592,741.14 over three years. They estimate the cost to the city to be between $1 million and $2 million.

“We know the number is quite large (for the city),” said RHC board president Kent Lanum. “They have three law firms, four lawyers who have been billing them over the years. That’s not including the engineers or everyone else involved in the project. Just for me, if I were a citizen of New Albany, I would be upset because transparency is the key to effective government, and once you stop doing that, you start to lose your legitimacy as a leader of a community.”

Gahan maintains that all costs of the dam litigation “have been allocated from current budgets” and the administration “has not spent too much of the budget.”

Still, some city council members signed a letter expressing disappointment at the mayor’s lack of response to their request for information before the budget vote. The letter detailed that if legal privilege prevented the disclosure of that information, “it was never communicated or explained – formally or informally – to the council as a whole.”

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