The Crossville City Council Tuesday suspended City Manager Greg Wood and hired a Chattanooga law firm to investigate events surrounding the raid and eviction of residents last week at the Village Inn.

Wood was suspended with pay for three weeks while the matter is investigated. City Clerk Valerie Hale will serve as interim city manager, with a corresponding increase in pay.

The council unanimously approved the law firm of Robinson, Smith and Wells to conduct the investigation, at a cost of $200 an hour, not to exceed $10,000. City Attorney Will Ridley recommended the third-party investigation on the advice of insurance attorneys. Ridley said he didn’t learn of the raid and evictions until he read it later in the news.

Residents of the Village Inn, on Wednesday, July 27th were given 12 hours to vacate their residences after a narcotics raid revealed what officials said were numerous code violations and unsafe living conditions. Residents were allowed back the next day after the city attorney said there were “procedural errors” with the evictions.

Steve Threet, who manages the property, and Dr. Robert “Buck” Wood, the property’s owner, defended the Village Inn and its tenants. 

Wood said the city’s action was “very slanderous to me and Mr. Threet” but that he’d like to move forward without lawsuits and sit down and “talk about it” with city officials.

“If there are code violations then we need to know about them,” Wood said. “I’d like to see us move forward without legal action.”

Mayor James Mayberry told Wood that he wants to wait on the results of the investigation. Wood said he didn’t want the investigation. Mayberry said the investigation would be impartial.

Wood said that neither he nor Threet were notified of code violations, similar to when the city forced Village Inn to close in 2009. He said that at the time of last week’s closure, 44 rooms were occupied and that residents of 22 rooms have returned. He expects residents of eight more rooms to return.

He said the Village Inn, which for years operated as the Capri Motel, is a low-income housing unit that works with tenants on their rent payments, even carrying some who can’t pay full rent.

Threet, who has managed the property for 25 years said that “90 percent of my issues” are from homeless and other people who don’t live at Village Inn. He said he’s personally escorted drug dealers off the property. Threet called the evictions “heartless” and said that he thinks his business was “targeted” because of its location beside City Hall.

District Attorney Bryant Dunaway said that he and police had been watching Village Inn for some time, saying it was a “very problematic property” and that his office considered filing a nuisance suit but said a case must be put together. His office filed a nuisance suit against the Budget Inn in Crossville several years ago and was successful in shutting that business down for a year while its “problems were fixed.”

“It’s a process,” he said, adding that a nuisance suit against Village Inn is no longer being considered.

After the meeting, Wood called problems at Village Inn “a symptom of the lawlessness in this country.

“Until we start enforcing our laws we’re not going to control our drug problem,” he said.

Records show that Wood bought the Village Inn property in 1991.