Legal dispute lingers five years after homeowner sued the town of Iron Gate

IRON GATE, Va. (WDBJ) - Five years after a resident of Iron Gate sued the Alleghany Co. town and won, the lawsuit lingers. And during that time, the judgment has grown to more than twice the town’s annual budget.

Now, the two sides are talking, and both say they hope to put the long-running legal dispute behind them.

Jennifer Simpson Worley can tell you exactly where a drainage pipe runs through her property.

“This is actually the way the pipe runs across the yard,” she said when we visited her property last year.

But five and a half years ago, she didn’t know the pipe even existed. That changed during the week of Christmas in 2018.

“My basement was flooded, my garage was flooded, an inundation of water that I couldn’t understand. I didn’t know what had happened,” she told us.

What had happened became clear a few days later when she saw water bubbling up in her yard, and a town crew started digging to diagnose the problem. The drainage pipe had failed.

“From there we had a simple solution, we had proposed, which you know would have cost them a fraction of what the outcome is today,” Worley told us.

There would be no “simple solution.” The town offered to relocate the pipe to another part of her property, but wanted an easement that Simpson says would have extended five feet into her home. She contacted Attorney Josh Baker.

“My first conversation with her, I told her I think I can have this resolved for you with a couple of phone calls, maybe a letter or two,” Baker said in an interview.

But in the weeks that followed, the town advertised a public hearing on the “possible imposition of the Jennifer Simpson tax.”

“This is a small town,” Worley said. “When I go to get gas, or I’m at the Post Office, town people you know recognize me. They shun me because of this.”

And during that 2019 hearing recorded by The Alleghany Journal, Town Attorney Jared Jenkins said a proposed settlement would require customers of the town’s sewer system to pay $165 each. Jenkins said he was confident the town would prevail in court.

“We haven’t intentionally flooded anybody. We haven’t done anything on purpose. The only thing we’ve done intentionally was try to help out a citizen, by helping them figure out what the problem was. And this is where we end up,” Jenkins said during the meeting.

Ultimately, Worley took the town to court in what’s known as an inverse condemnation case. The court ruled the town was liable for taking her property without just compensation and awarded her more than $37,000. The town appealed. And again, Worley prevailed.

But now the size of the award, attorney fees and interest had climbed to more than $200,000.

“I think they received bad advice and they took it at every turn. And that has resulted in five years of litigation and now a condition in which the town of Iron Gate is facing an existential crisis,” Baker told WDBJ7.

We asked Iron Gate Mayor Kawahna Persinger where the lawsuit ranks in the town’s list of priorities.

“I would say up front, first,” Persinger said. “We would like to get this rectified, and sorted out, and put this behind us.”

Persinger has served on Town Council since 2018. She was elected Mayor last November and took office in January.

In a recent conversation with WDBJ7, she apologized that the case has continued as long as it has, and for any “disgruntled” or “rude” remarks that Worley and her attorney have endured.

“That’s totally wrong and you’re not going to find that from me,” Persinger said. “And I’m not going to tolerate it from anybody else in the town.”

Attorney Jared Jenkins isn’t representing the town today. His law license was suspended for nine months, following sanctions in an unrelated case. We were unable to reach him for this story. Iron Gate’s new Town Attorney is Jim Guynn.

“My job now is get the town going in the right direction,” he said.

Guynn has extensive experience representing other local governments in western Virginia and said he’s exploring what can be done to resolve the issue.

“But in any event here we are. We’ve got to deal with it. That’s what judgments are and we have to deal with them,” Guynn said in an interview. “And we’re going to do the best we can both for the town and we have to get the judgment satisfied.”

Both sides were due in court in February for a hearing to assess additional attorney fees, but Worley and Baker agreed to a delay while the town explored a payment proposal. That process is continuing with a new deadline at the end of the month.

Meanwhile, the trench on Worley’s property is still open, and the pipe is still waiting for replacement or repair.