(Jud Burkett | Special to The Tribune) Hurricane Mayor Nanette Billings addresses those on hand for a groundbreaking event for a new recreation center Tuesday, Sep. She learned from one that Lichfield had a metal building stored in Utah that had never been erected. When she became mayor in 2021, she began reaching out to local business leaders asking them to help fund a center. It’s just tough.” A needed recreation center becomes controversialīillings said Hurricane residents voted down a general obligation bond several years ago which would have funded a $26 million recreation facility. “So how do you say no? He didn’t ask for it, I asked him. “Someone donated something to you,” she said. She estimated that with the donated building, the cost to build the recreation center will be around $1 million. I provided business services that were non-supervision, care, or treatment services to schools that were independently owned and operated.”Įfforts to reach Lichfield on Monday were unsuccessful.īillings, Hurricane’s mayor, said she knew about these allegations before she asked Lichfield if the city could name the building after him.īut the city needs a place for people to recreate, she reasoned, and his help would save the city money.

“I wasn’t there, I didn’t abuse or mistreat students, nor did I encourage or direct someone else to do so. “Allegations against schools I did not own or manage, I can’t answer,” he wrote in an email to The New York Times. Lichfield has tried to distance himself from these allegations, telling a Times reporter in 2013 that he supplied only business and educational services to programs, and did not know children were being harmed. A judge dismissed that lawsuit several years later, ruling the group had not properly argued a fraud claim. The complaint also alleges students were forced into sexual acts. In a 2011 Utah lawsuit, about 500 parents and former residents sued WWASPS, alleging in court papers that students were beaten, chained, locked in dog cages, forced to eat vomit and made to lie in urine and feces as punishment. The Costa Rican facility, The Times reported, dissolved in 2003 after the students revolted when national officials visited the program and informed the teenagers of their rights. The New York Times reported in 2003 that, by that time, WWASPS-affiliated programs in Mexico, Costa Rica, Western Samoa and the Czech Republic had closed under allegations of cruelty. His network of programs, operated under the umbrella company called the Worldwide Association of Speciality Programs and Schools, was plagued by allegations of severe abuse and torture at many facilities before the company dissolved in 2010. There is currently no federal oversight of these types of programs, though former residents-turned-activists are working now to lobby Congress to pass a bill to collect more data and require reporting standards.īut in the early 2000s, these types of programs were much less regulated in Utah and elsewhere - due, in part, to Lichfield’s own lobbying opposing stricter standards. It was traumatizing, she said, to watch as her friend screamed while staff members once held her down in a restraint.Īllegations of abuse and mistreatment have come out of Utah troubled teen programs for years, which by 2021 led Utah legislators to add more regulations to the industry. When she thinks back to her time at the facility, Hutchings said, she remembers struggling to advance in the program because she was shy and quiet. (It was called Cross Creek then.) Today, it’s a hotel that caters to tourists making the 20-mile drive to Zion National Park. Hutchings attended Horizon Academy, which was Lichfield’s first program and opened in the mid-1980s. Worldwide Association of Speciality Programs and Schools “It was like a slap in the face,” she said. The 25-year-old still lives in Hurricane now, and she said she felt angry when she found out that a building would be dedicated in Lichfield’s name. Hurricane Mayor Nanette Billings said the city opted to name the building after the longtime La Verkin entrepreneur for a simple reason: He donated it.īut former residents of troubled-teen programs - including some Utahns - are upset that the small city would honor a man they say built his wealth growing a network of problematic programs.Īllie Hutchings’ parents sent her to a Lichfield program in 2013 when she was a young teenager.

Hurricane punch