Judge Oxendine removed from group’s board

By Tim Eberly and James Salzer 
jsalzer@ajc.com

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A Gwinnett County senior judge was kicked off the board of a nonprofit organization after the board said he had entered into an agreement to pay a fellow board member nearly $400,000 without authorization, records show.

Senior Judge James “Jim” Oxendine and the board member who received the money, attorney Wayne Reece, were removed from the board of the Roosevelt Warm Springs Rehabilitation Development Fund, the fund-raising arm of the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. Oxendine was chairman and Reece was the vice chairman.

Oxendine is the father of state Insurance Commissioner and gubernatorial candidate John Oxendine.

When reached by phone Wednesday evening, Jim Oxendine and Reece both said board members were aware of the financial arrangement.

“This was something that all of the board members knew,” Oxendine said. “They’re lying if they sit there and say they didn’t know about it.”

The board’s interim chair, Vicki Gordon, could not be reached for comment Wednesday evening.

A state-run facility in Meriwether County, the Warm Springs institute was founded in 1927 by Franklin D. Roosevelt to treat victims of polio. It now treats people with all types of disabilities, according to its Web site.

The news comes two weeks after Gwinnett’s Superior Court judges relieved Jim Oxendine of his duties after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on his involvement in negotiating a land deal for a real estate developer. Superior Court rules prohibit senior judges from practicing law.

An audit uncovered the payments to Reece & Associates, owned by Reece, according to the board’s minutes of the special called Aug. 1 meeting, obtained by the AJC.

According to the documents, neither Jim Oxendine nor Reece had the authority to make the financial arrangement, and none of the other members of the board’s executive committee knew about the payments. The minutes also said that Oxendine and Reece “made attempts to conceal” the agreement from the other board members.

The board’s executive committee discussed — and apparently voted on — the matter in a June 2007 meeting, but the financial arrangement discovered during the audit “did not correspond to the original scope and intent of the motion,” according to the minutes.

“The terms and financial obligation of the original motion were not discussed or voted on by the Executive Committee,” the minutes say.

Oxendine said that’s not true.

“We wouldn’t hire a guy and not discuss what we’re paying him,” he said. “We voted to hire him and we voted to pay him. They all knew this.”

Reece, however, said the executive committee voted to hire his firm, but did not vote on the financial terms.

Reece said the contract stated that his firm would be paid $15,000 a month.

“If some people didn’t know about it, I don’t understand why they didn’t know about it,” Reece said. “There is no secret here.”

Oxendine said the executive committee agreed to pay Reece for consulting and lobbying in order to develop a program at Warm Springs for military veterans to get psychological treatment.

One of Reece’s primary goals was to get federal dollars to make the program happen, Oxendine said.

In the past two years, Reece’s company collected $345,000 from the nonprofit — $196,278 in fiscal 2008 and $148,545 in fiscal 2009, according to the board’s minutes. Another $47,958 payment was held, the minutes show.

Oxendine, who said he has served on the Warm Springs board for 25 years, did not attend the meeting in which he and Reece were unanimously removed from the board. He said he was asked not to attend the meeting, and that the board members did not tell him what it was about. He said he did not make any effort to set the record straight after he was removed from the board.

Reece also was asked not to attend the meeting, he said. He received a telephone call from another board member delivering the news that he and Oxendine had been removed.

“Sometimes people decide to change and go in a different direction,” he said. “That may be what’s behind these actions. I don’t know.”

Reece is a longtime lobbyist for insurance and other interests at the Capitol. He also has been a big-money donor to political candidates, including John Oxendine and state Attorney General Thurbert Baker.

He donated $35,000 for various Oxendine campaigns between 2004 and 2007.