UCA’S Newton: Resisted pressure
Meadors wanted Aramark letter gone, vice president says
CONWAY — A University of Central Arkansas vice president said Saturday that former President Allen Meadors tried to persuade her to destroy a letter in which Aramark offered $700,000 to renovate the president’s home but only if UCA extended the food vendor’s contract.
In her first interview discussing the events that transpired in August, Diane Newton, vice president for finance and administration, said she never even considered destroying the letter despite Meadors’ efforts to make her do so.
“When I asked him, why would I get rid of mine ... because he still has his [copy], he said, well, he got rid of his,” Newton said.
Disclosure of the Aug. 12 letter from Aramark to Newton led to Meadors’ resignation within days, to a trustee’s resignation months later and to an investigation by the Arkansas State Police.
In the letter to Newton, Aramark said it would pro-
vide $700,000 to finance further renovations of the Ucaowned president’s house, but only if UCA extended Aramark’s contract for seven years. Further, the money was to be amortized, or recovered and likely with interest, by Aramark over the coming years.
Yet when Scott Roussel, then chairman of the UCA board of trustees, announced the offer at an Aug. 26 trustees meeting, he described it as “a very generous donation” and a “godsend.”
Neither he nor Meadors told other trustees or the public about the contract contingency until after the Arkansas Democrat-gazette obtained a copy of the letter, a public record, on Aug. 30 under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.
Meadors resigned Sept. 2, and Roussel resigned from the board last week after the UCA faculty senate urged him to do so and after he and Gov. Mike Beebe had two phone conversations about his trustee status.
On Friday, two sources who asked not to be identified said Meadors had pressured Newton to shred the letter, that she had gone to Tom Courtway, then UCA’S general counsel and now its president, and that he had told her she absolutely should not do so.
In an e-mail Saturday, Newton wrote that she had talked with Courtway by phone on Aug. 30, after she had already turned the letter over to UCA spokesman Jeff Pitchford to comply with the newspaper’s public-records request.
“In my phone conversation with Tom ... I was very disturbed that ACM [Allen C. Meadors] had told me to get rid of the document, to destroy it, to give it back to ARA [Aramark],” Newton wrote.
“I did not ask Tom if I should shred it or get rid of it,” Newton added. “I told Tom I would NOT do that, Tom said of course I would not and that no one would have their job threatened for doing the right thing as long as he was at UCA. I never had any intention of getting rid of the letter.”
Contacted by phone in North Carolina on Saturday, Meadors said, “I definitely don’t remember saying anything about destroying the letter or getting rid of it. I didn’t think she [Newton] had a copy” until then.
Asked why he would have thought she no longer had the letter which was written to her, Meadors said something that was unclear, then the phone connection ended.
Earlier in the interview, Meadors said, “I don’t know what I said that she heard wrong. I’m sorry that happened.”
Newton “misunderstood something,” he added.
“We went ahead and sent it [the letter]” to the newspaper, he said.
Newton said in the interview Saturday that Meadors called her on her way to a meeting after he learned she had turned the letter over to Pitchford.
Newton said Meadors told her to get rid of the letter “several times within the same call. ... He reiterated it over and over.”
“Maybe he didn’t say ‘shred,’” Newton said. “He gave me plenty of options.”
Meadors “was very upset with me” for turning over the letter and for not already getting rid of it, Newton said.
“I told him that Scott had a copy, the board had a copy, Aramark had a copy. ... He said, ‘I don’t know what the board has.’”
Before the Aug. 26 board meeting, Newton said, Meadors had told her that he and Roussel would tell the other trustees about the letter.
“Before he called me and during that board meeting ... I had no indication that the board of trustees did not know what was in that letter,” she said.
Meadors said he had “no way of knowing what Scott was saying to the board members” before the Aug. 26 meeting and added, “I had no idea what anybody knew.”
Courtway declined comment Saturday because of the ongoing investigation.
The Arkansas State Police has turned over its findings to the prosecutor's office. Prosecuting Attorney Cody Hiland’s office is deciding whether to proceed with state-level criminal charges against anyone in the case.
After the board learned of the contract contingency, trustees decided not to accept the $700,000 offer. The board recently approved a new contract with Aramark. This one is more favorable to UCA than the previous one and does not include any money for the president’s house.
Under Arkansas law, tampering with a public record is a Class D felony punishable by up to six years in prison. Tampering with public court records is either the more serious Class B or C felony.
Arkansas Code Annotated 5-54-121 says in part:
“A person commits the offense of tampering with a public record if, with the purpose of impairing the verity, legibility, or availability of a public record, he or she knowingly:
“(1) Makes a false entry in or falsely alters any public record; or
“(2) Erases, obliterates, removes, destroys, or conceals a public record.”
Arkansas Code Annotated 5-3-301 says in part that “criminal solicitation” is a “Class A misdemeanor if the offense solicited is a Class D felony or an unclassified felony.” A Class A misdemeanor is punishable by up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Violation of the state’s Freedom of Information Act is a less serious Class C misdemeanor.