During an interview with Brenda Holt of the State Auditor and Inspector’s office in July 2021, Chickasha lawyer David Perryman, then the attorney for the Town of Bradley, described the Grady County community as “a mess” and said he had no indication that any of the warring factions “want to get along” or “work it out.”
Later that year Perryman sent then-Clerk/Treasurer Anita Fowler an email in which he advised that he was “no longer willing to contract with the Town of Bradley to serve as its municipal attorney.”
In an interview on Aug. 18, 2022, with state auditor Jay Holland, Perryman, a former state legislator, said he disassociated himself from the town because of the disorganization and constant discord among town residents and the board of trustees.
For example, former Mayor Robert Pinnick told Southwest Ledger he resigned his post in early 2000 because of a feud with a newly appointed trustee and a petition that was circulated to have Pinnick ousted from office.
Subsequently a vacant house Pinnick owned was destroyed by fire in early July 2021. Investigators determined that arson was the cause.
Pinnick told the Ledger that the unoccupied house – which had been his grandparents’ residence and was the house in which they reared him as a boy – “was used for when our family members came to visit” during vacations and holidays. That house was a block from where Pinnick lives in Bradley – a town in which family members have lived since before statehood, he said.
He said he found a can of lighter fluid near the south door of the house “a couple of days before” the fire, and that lighter fluid was squirted through the back door of the house the night of the fire.
The Town of Bradley had little, if any, revenue before Pinnick proposed, and town residents approved, “a fractional tax on utilities,” he told state auditor John McLemore. That levy was intended to be collected just in the incorporated limits of the town, but instead was collected in a wider area that “took in gas plants and everything else,” Pinnick said.
As a direct result, the General Fund bank account for Bradley – which has an estimated population of 85 – had a balance of $504,531 on June 30, 2024, state auditors reported.
Less than two years after Perryman bowed out as town attorney, Veradel Baker filed a petition in Grady County District Court on April 6, 2023, urging the court to throw out the results of the biennial municipal election in Bradley that was held two days earlier – and was never reported to the State Election Board.
Baker asked the court to “order a re-election presided over by Grady County District 3 Commissioner Gary Bray or the Grady County sheriff” – or, in the alternative, Baker suggested, the court could “dissolve the town” pursuant to a state statute which provides, “The district attorney for the county in which the situs of the municipal government is located may petition for involuntary dissolution of a municipality” under certain circumstances.
“Several Bradley residents would like to have the town dissolved,” Baker wrote, “so we can re-incorporate the town under competent leadership with five trustees, administrative ordinances for the proper and legal functioning of the governing body, and expanded corporate boundaries to repopulate the town and provide more opportunities to vote and serve the Board of Trustees.”
The town government of Bradley is “on the verge of administrative collapse,” Baker alleged in her petition. She also claimed the town was “governed by three families who have marginalized and threatened those they are not related to,” and allegedly told a friend who was interviewed by a state auditor that one of those families is “like the Mafia.”
Baker claimed that in 2005 the Oklahoma Water Resources Board “threatened to burn a woman’s house for reporting them” to the state Department of Environmental Quality.
Baker also submitted a request for numerous town records, but the date she filed it was not listed. She requested the town’s election results, meeting minutes and agendas from April 6 through June 25, 2021, and also wanted photographs of all town records “from 1997 to 2021.”
Then-Town Clerk Anita Fowler, who was elected to that post on April 6, 2021, noted that the volume of records Baker wanted photographed was massive.
Baker dropped her lawsuit eight weeks later; conceded that Kristy Craig was lawfully elected to the town’s Board of Trustees in Ward 1, Jerry Beverly was lawfully elected Ward 3 trustee, and Jamie Beverly was lawfully elected town clerk; withdrew her Open Records requests; and waived “any allegations of election irregularity from Jan. 1, 1997, to April 4, 2023, and shall be prohibited from filing any pleadings alleging the same.” District Judge Kory Kirkland signed the agreement.
[ Related story, page 3]