A long trip for a short meeting

May 14, 2008

People who filed for bankruptcy in the Danville area and far Southwest Virginia now have to travel farther – as much as 86 miles farther – to attend short and simple trustees’ meetings. In Danville, the reason appears to be a battle between the General Services Administration, which manages office space, and the Department of Justice, which operates the bankruptcy trustee program.

When someone files for bankruptcy, a key step in the process is a meeting before a U.S. bankruptcy trustee, called a “Section 341 meeting,” named for the section of the Bankruptcy Code that gives creditors the chance to question the debtor about his financial situation.

Until last year, bankruptcy filers in the Danville and Martinsville areas went to trustee meetings in the historic Post Office Building on Main Street in Danville. In far Southwest Virginia, the debtors and creditors met at the federal courthouse on East Wood Street in Big Stone Gap.

Since last summer, however, the Danville-area debtors, their lawyers, and others interested in their cases have had to travel to Roanoke, a one-way trip of an hour and 44 minutes, according to mapmaker Rand McNally’s website.

The Big Stone Gap hearings are now held in Abingdon, 61 miles to the east. Rand McNally says that change should add an hour and 13 minutes to the one-way trip.

The issue in Danville is rent. GSA wants it. Justice has never paid it in those locales and does not want to start now. In Big Stone Gap, according to a spokesperson, the trustee program stopped holding the meetings because of the small number of cases in that area.

Some lawyers see the changes as evidence that the government wants to close the courthouses in Danville and Big Stone Gap, but officials deny knowledge of any such plans.

“I would be opposed to any closing of the federal court facilities in Danville,” said U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode, R-5th. “It has never been suggested to me” that the building might be closed, Goode said.

U.S. District Court Clerk John Corcoran also denied any knowledge of any plan to close courthouses in Danville or Big Stone Gap.

Bankruptcy lawyers protest the inconvenience to the citizens served by the bankruptcy courts. “We are failing the public when we move these meetings the way we did,” said Bob Copeland, who practices bankruptcy law in Abingdon.

“It’s a battle between the GSA and the Department of Justice, and the citizens who need the facilities have no say so and cannot use it,” echoed Lewis E. “Red” Goodman Jr, of Danville. Goodman has been practicing bankruptcy law in Danville since 1973, using rooms in the post office building for trustee meetings until the meetings were moved last year.

Goodman read through logs of his trips to Roanoke. Each one-way trip took about two hours for meetings that lasted only 10 to 15 minutes.

Goode says that with gas prices as high as they are, forcing participants to travel that distance is “absurd.”

“Somebody needs to see that these people don’t have to travel to Roanoke,” Goode said.

The Justice Department’s trustee program has been hit with a budget cut and is trying to cut costs. In Danville, the GSA wants $280 dollars a month to rent rooms for the trustee meetings. The trustee program, which previously had free space available, does not want to start paying now. The trustee program rejected a proposal to rent rooms at the Danville Airport, which currently hosts Social Security and workers’ compensation hearings. Apparently, the trustee program is holding out for free meeting space.

“We have unsuccessfully searched for space available free of charge in Danville and nearby Martinsville,” wrote a spokesperson. “We recognize that the distance debtors and attorneys must travel between Danville and Roanoke is inconvenient, and we are continuing to search for free space in the Danville area.”

Written by Paul Fletcher  |  Filed Under Trends 

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