CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Yeager Airport is being sued by a bankrupt Charleston development company that claims the airport hasn’t followed through financially on a land alteration deal.
Corotoman, owned by developer John Wellford, filed the complaint last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia.
The lawsuit spun out of Corotoman’s ongoing Chapter 11 bankruptcy as an adversary proceeding.
Corotoman has property at the Northgate development adjacent to the airport. Wellford, its owner, was a longstanding member of Yeager Airport’s governing board.
In a separate but related action, Wellford and Corotoman are being sued for pocketing $1.5 million in rent from Ticketmaster, which is located at the Northgate property, and then failing to pass it along to pay down a loan to develop the property.
One of the government entities suing Corotorman is the Kanawha County Commission, which is one of the operators of the airport.
So, the situation is tangled.
Yeager Airport officials, in a statement distributed last week, said they would fight Corotoman’s lawsuit.
“We respect the legal process and we will respond appropriately,” stated airport director Nick Keller.
Corotoman’s claim is rooted in improvements meant to remove runway obstacles at Charleston’s hilltop airport.
In the mid-2000s, the airport governing board decided to expand its main runway and remove an obstruction — a knoll off the runway’s south end. There were also trees and houses considered obstructions.
The obstructions limited airplanes’ takeoff weight during summer months on longer routes, meaning some seats could not be sold.
Corotorman owned a large portion of land that needed to be cleared. The airport and Wellford negotiated a series of agreements starting in 2011. The eventual compensation, Corotorman says,was to amount to $350,000.
More talks continued over the next few years over whether the airport was living up to the terms.
Then, in 2015, the safety area at the end of the runway failed, causing the collapse of hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of fill and other material.
Lawyers for Corotoman say the two parties started working on an amended agreement allowing the airport authority access to Corotoman property to remove the landslide material as well as a settlement of $3.5 million.
But the amended agreement was not signed by either party.
Corotorman says it received a few checks amounting to $500,000 but then stopped receiving anything in mid-2015,