In 2004, a public junior college in North Texas abandoned plans to lease some of its land to a religious organization for $1 month after the state attorney general warned that the effort could violate the law.
Nearly two decades later, the college went further. After publicly posting only that Weatherford College’s board would meet to discuss property, members emerged from behind closed doors in November 2022 and voted unanimously to give a 38-acre property to Community Christian School. The property was valued at more than $2 million, according to the county’s appraisal district.
“Faith and patience is the path,” Dan Curlee, then the college’s attorney, wrote in an email after the vote to Doug Jefferson, the administrator of the private religious school.
Jefferson, who had asked the college to donate its workforce development center in Mineral Wells, about 50 miles west of Fort Worth, replied: “Praise God. He has walked with me every step of the way on this miracle for our school. So appreciate you,” according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
About two years later, the property sits empty as Community Christian School raises the funds needed to make repairs that Jefferson estimates will cost $1.2 million. The donation also raises questions about government oversight at a time when state and local officials are increasingly blurring the lines between church and state, experts said.
Legal experts say the donation appears to have violated multiple state and federal laws, including a provision in the Texas Constitution that prohibits political subdivisions, including public junior colleges, from granting anything of value to aid an individual, association or corporation without return benefit. They also pointed to another provision in state law that prohibits public junior colleges from conveying, selling or exchanging their land for less than fair market value unless the land goes to an abutting property owner.
In 2004, then-state Attorney General Greg Abbott, now the governor, cited that provision when Weatherford College had planned to lease half an acre of land to the Wesley Foundation, a United Methodist campus ministry that planned to build a student center with a nondenominational chapel and church administrative offices. Abbott’s opinion said Texas law required the college to charge fair market value when selling or leasing land and to maintain control over the property, which the public school system had not done.
Retired Baylor University law professor Ron Beal said the same tenets apply to the more recent transaction. Had the college simply looked back on Abbott’s 2004 opinion, it would have known better, he said. “The junior college is absolutely prohibited from doing what they did,” he said. “It was a pure gratuitous transfer of public monies to solely benefit private persons at the expense of state taxpayers.”
Texas provides little oversight in such cases. Community college land transactions are not under the purview of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which oversees public junior colleges, according to an agency spokesperson. The spokesperson said complaints about such transactions can be filed with the attorney general, who can choose whether to investigate. The Texas attorney general’s office, which did not respond to requests for comment, didn’t receive complaints related to the donation, according to records obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune.
College board members who voted in favor of the donation either did not reply to requests for comment or declined to speak with the news organizations.
The donation generally went under the radar even in the small, rural community. The local paper covered a ribbon-cutting ceremony but did not address the legality of the donation. John Kuhn, who served as superintendent for the Mineral Wells Independent School District at the time, said he had no idea the college was donating the land. Had Kuhn known, he said he would have asked that his district be considered. It is running out of space in its elementary schools and might have even contemplated buying the property, Kuhn said.
Credit:
Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune
Aside from the legal questions, the donation raises concerns in a state that increasingly blurs the line between church and state, said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus. He pointed to examples including a new law that allows schools to hire unlicensed chaplains to work in mental health roles, Abbott’s hard push for a school voucher-like program that would allow taxpayer funding to support private and religious education, and the State Board of Education’s consideration of a measure that would require schools to teach the Bible.
“Over time, you’ve had so many of these issues that have battered the guardrails to the point now where it’s hard to have the guardrails be the divider of church and state as designed in some of these laws,” Rottinghaus said.
Curlee, the college’s attorney who has since retired, said the potential liability of owning the aging property outweighed its usefulness and that the college had already started moving classes to other buildings prior to the donation. He and the college’s current attorney, Jay Rutherford, maintain the donation did not violate any laws. Neither explained their reasoning or responded to questions about what legal experts told ProPublica and the Tribune.
Those experts also said the donation appears to violate the U.S. Constitution because, by Curlee’s own acknowledgment, the college never listed the property for sale and did not offer to donate it to any other organizations.
“If there’s evidence here that the college was not neutral, and that it was favoring this Christian school and left everyone else out of the process, that would violate the principle of Carson v. Makin,” said Steven Collis, a law professor and director of the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, referring to a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Maine’s school voucher program could not exclude religious schools.
Jefferson, the administrator of Community Christian School, said he did not believe the donation violated any laws and that God gave him the property as a reward for taking care of it in the past. The private Christian school would at times use the property at no cost for one-act play competitions. When it did so, Jefferson said he cleaned, paid for utilities and provided liability insurance.
“And I did that because I believe God said that building belongs to us. I believed for years and years that was going to happen and then it did,” he said.
