Politics

SBI probed candidate's spending as council member

By Bill Moss, Published: July 28, 2013

Former Hendersonville City Council member Diane Caldwell says she wrote a check to the district attorney as repayment for a trip to Memphis after the SBI questioned her about the travel money.Caldwell, who served on the City Council from 1993 to 1997 and is a candidate this year, said the investigation turned up a small discrepancy in her travel claim.
"I'm glad you asked that," she said in an interview. "Most people do not know what happened. The travel reimbursement was really not an issue. It was a $29 discrepancy in the report. When we returned from the trip the Community Foundation and police did not say they wanted their money back."
Caldwell was part of an organization called the City of Refuge Education Center, or CORE, that in 1997 applied for and received money from the Henderson County Community Foundation, a city police fund and other donors for a trip to Memphis where children were to learn about Martin Luther King Jr. and visit the motel where a gunman assassinated him, Caldwell and others said in interviews with the Hendersonville Lightning.
Former Hendersonville mayor Fred Niehoff said that he reported the situation to then-District Attorney Jeff Hunt because the spending did not add up.
"I turned everything over to the district attorney and never heard much about it," Niehoff said in an interview from his home in Sun City, S.C. "I gave him the documents and it was up to him to do what he wanted to do. I don't know what went on in the background. I just told Jeff the main thing I was interested in was that she not stay on City Council. I never told her directly, 'Diane, I don't want you to be on the City Council.'
"Since nothing came out, I just presume that this was one way for her listen to whomever. This was her way of bowing out gracefully. I left it completely in the hands of the district attorney. It's one of those things that it's too bad it happened but it happened."
"The whole trip was not as it was billed to be," said Niehoff, who served three terms as mayor before retiring in 2005. "She got funding from a fund at the police department and the Community Foundation. It was in the hundreds of dollars but not a gross amount. The whole scenario was just not right."
Community Foundation CEO McCray Benson, in response to a request from the Hendersonville Lightning to check on records of a 1997 grant application, said the foundation contributed $500. The application Caldwell and CORE submitted also listed donations or requests from the police fund and individuals totaling $2,300, he said.
"We did turn over the information to the district attorney, who did call in the SBI," Benson said. "At that point the police department was actually the largest grantor. Some individuals put in some dollars and a church put in some dollars. From our point of view it was a smaller amount. However, from our follow-up, it wasn't supported well and we turned that information over to the city and they called the SBI and the district attorney."
Caldwell recalled the interview with an SBI agent. The agent, she said, characterized the investigation as minor.
"The Community Foundation did not respond until I got a notice that I was being investigated," she said. "The SBI came up to talk to me. They literally told me, 'We don't see this as an issue. We just came up because they told us to.'"
Once the investigators questioned the documentation, she said, she wrote a check to Hunt for $500. She said the group she was a part of rented two cars but drove only one, leaving one in her driveway, and did not have to pay for it. She said a city police officer and other chaperones went on the trip, though "we ended up not taking as many children as we planned to take."
"When I heard from the SBI, I said I have the money," she said. "I wrote a check and gave it to Jeff Hunt, and I said, 'here's the check.'"
Caldwell said she's turning her attention now to the campaign.
Niehoff said she planned to file for mayor in 1997 but withdrew once the district attorney started probing her travel reimbursement claim. Caldwell ran for the City Council four years ago and lost.