The push for a potential merger between Appalachian School of Law in Grundy with a Kentucky university is continuing, despite what some say are efforts by local officials to derail it.
Buchanan County supervisors recently ousted the chair of the county’s industrial development board, who said he believes his removal is tied to disputes related to the struggling law school.
The board of supervisors and the IDA have disagreed about how, and whether, to allocate additional funding to the financially struggling school while it explores a potential merger with another university. And at least one county supervisor, who also serves on the law school’s board, has said he is unwilling to agree to any arrangement that takes control of ASL out of the hands of the board of supervisors. The supervisors have some say in the school’s operation under a 1994 agreement that founded the school in Grundy.
Supervisors removed Tim O’Quinn, the IDA chairman, in a unanimous vote during a July 10 special meeting. It was the latest shake-up on a local board this summer: Supervisors replaced two members of the law school’s board of trustees in May, and two additional members of the IDA board resigned or were removed after a series of meetings with county supervisors over the future of the law school.
In February, county supervisors agreed to provide $3.4 million to keep the law school afloat, following a request for as much as $6 million. School leaders have said that without ongoing investment from the county or a large increase in enrollment, the school’s financial challenges will continue.
In May, Jerry Kilgore, chair of the ASL board of trustees and a former state attorney general, appointed a committee to explore a partnership, or even a merger, with the University of Pikeville, or UPike. It’s the latest effort to save the independent law school — one of just a dozen nationwide — after years of financial challenges.
Representatives from ASL, Buchanan County and UPike have been meeting this summer to come up with the terms for a merger and preparing to seek approval from the schools’ accreditors.
Previous potential mergers, including a proposed partnership with Roanoke College, would have moved the school out of Grundy — something some Buchanan County supervisors adamantly opposed.
The school was founded in 1994, with significant support from the county and its IDA, in part to boost the county’s economy and develop a pipeline of attorneys for rural Southwest Virginia and Central Appalachia.
An agreement then between the county, the IDA and the school laid out the donation of county property and $2.5 million in startup expenses for the school and the county’s role in appointing members of the school’s governance board. The compact also says that the school can’t move out of Grundy without approval from the Buchanan County Board of Supervisors.
Turmoil among Buchanan County leaders
Contention between the Buchanan County Board of Supervisors and the county’s IDA traces back to a meeting in February.
O’Quinn, the former chairman, said in an interview that the board asked the IDA to approve a $3.4 million appropriation to ASL at a Feb. 12 meeting. All seven members of the IDA voted to table the appropriation, saying they wanted more time to review the school’s finances and “do our due diligence for taxpayers,” O’Quinn said.
By the next morning, O’Quinn said he had received a text message from supervisor Trey Adkins saying the board would work with the town of Grundy’s IDA instead. Either IDA could have acted as a conduit to help the county appropriate the funds, Adkins explained.
The Grundy IDA approved $3.4 million to be transferred by the county for the law school to “allow it to continue to maintain its campus in the Town of Grundy,” according to minutes from a special called meeting on March 11.
The school had to submit a financial plan by March 2 in order to receive the funds, according to the minutes. Law school officials confirmed that a plan was submitted, but declined to provide a copy. A call and email to the Buchanan County Administrator’s Office were not immediately returned Friday.
Dennis Ramey, property manager for the Grundy IDA, did not immediately respond to a request for comment by email.
O’Quinn said when the county IDA asked for a financial audit of the school, Adkins told him to “quit digging.”
In a phone call last week, Adkins denied this, and said supervisors felt the need to work quickly. “We were led to believe … that if there wasn’t some sort of help, ASL would have to close its doors,” Adkins said.
Last December, ASL President and Dean David Western had told supervisors that the school needed at least $2.5 million to remain open even through the spring.
On April 6, IDA Director Matt Fields resigned from two county positions he held — economic development director and tourism and marketing director — but said he would continue serving as director of the IDA, according to a resignation letter provided to Cardinal News. Adkins said Fields, who declined to answer questions for this story, resigned from the position and the board of supervisors voted to accept his resignation. IDA board member Harry Presley resigned shortly after Fields; he also declined to comment for this story.
O’Quinn, who was still on the IDA board at the time, said he believes these departures happened for the same reason: disagreements over the law school. He said the same was true for his removal, which took place during the July 10 meeting that lasted less than five minutes.
“I think it’s because I stood up to him,” O’Quinn said of Adkins. He said he was not told the reason for his removal, but believes it also has to do with his plan to run against Lee Dotson, the North Grundy supervisor, for a seat on the board of supervisors next year.
Adkins has his own reasoning, which he shared on Facebook and reiterated in the July interview. He said O’Quinn hired and paid an attorney to represent the IDA as outside counsel for the ASL discussion during the Feb. 12 meeting without going through the proper channels. He also said O’Quinn led an effort to hire Fields on a grant-writing contract after Fields left the IDA at the end of June. Adkins said O’Quinn had been told not to hire Fields back by supervisors.
“He’s grasping at straws,” O’Quinn said. He said the IDA “went through the proper channels” in hiring the attorney and said he was not the board member who brought up the idea of contracting with Fields.
“My opinion is that Tim O’Quinn was part of a scheme to withhold the money to make sure the college was given to Roanoke,” Adkins added, and also cited O’Quinn’s aspirations to run against Dotson, saying the “respectful thing for Tim to have done was to resign” from the IDA.
Adkins said O’Quinn’s removal from the IDA board had “nothing to do with rubberstamping a check to the law school.” Adkins said at a March 13 meeting that there would be a way to remove county IDA members before their terms expire if they were on “different paths” regarding the county’s support of the law school.
The six other members on the board of supervisors did not respond to requests for comment by phone or email.
The board of supervisors has also changed the makeup of the law school’s board of trustees in recent months. Currently, the board of supervisors appoints up to nine of the up to 19 seats on the law school’s board. Another nine are appointed by the board of trustees itself, and the remaining seat on the board goes to the president of the school’s alumni association, according to a 2006 amendment to the compact.
In January, Adkins was appointed to replace county supervisor Roger Rife on the law school board.
The terms of four board members who had been appointed by county supervisors were set to expire at the end of June: Patrick Johnson, Donald Ratliff, Reece Hale Robertson and Jeff Taylor.
In May, the board of supervisors reappointed Taylor and Ratliff and replaced the other two with Sandy McGlothlin and Martha McGlothlin Bowman — the ex-wife and niece, respectively, of board member Michael McGlothlin. (The McGlothlin family and the James W. and Frances Gibson McGlothlin Foundation have been supporters of the law school since its inception.)
Robertson has since been reappointed to an at-large seat — one not controlled by county supervisors.
Work toward a merger continues
Disagreements remain among county officials about their authority over the law school and what a potential merger with UPike would, or should, look like.
Adkins said he does not object to the merger as long as it’s “structured properly,” which he said means keeping the law school in the hands of the board of supervisors.
He’s also raised concerns about the university moving the school out of Grundy, although he said he has not heard that this would be an option for UPike, whose main campus is in Pikeville, Kentucky, just over 40 miles from Grundy.
“We don’t want a situation where it’s a merger with UPike, and then they leave to Pikeville if it’s not doing well in a few years,” Adkins said, adding that the board would never “simply give it away.”
The 1996 agreement between the Buchanan County IDA and ASL prohibits the school from moving out of Grundy without approval from the IDA and the county board of supervisors, which is why other attempted mergers, such as with Roanoke College last fall, have failed, Kilgore said.
An addendum to that compact, signed by O’Quinn, Western and Kilgore in January 2026, also states that ASL would turn over any property it owns in Grundy to the county IDA “in the event ASL ceases to operate as an academic institution in Buchanan County, Virginia by reason of closure, merger, acquisition, or consolidation with another academic institution outside of Buchanan County.”
The agreement with the Grundy IDA said the same.
UPike President Burton Webb said in an email Tuesday that the university has no intention of moving the law school out of Grundy.
He declined to provide a timeline for next steps and did not provide information about the university’s work with its accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, toward the merger.
“I have publicly stated that we have no desire to move the law school. I stand by that statement,” Webb wrote. “The location is, in fact, one of the reasons we are interested in it. We believe cooperation across state lines is important for our Appalachian region. Whether or not the law school joins the UPIKE family, we will continue to look for ways to cooperate with Buchanan County.”
In May, Webb also told Cardinal News that the university is in preliminary talks with Buchanan General Hospital about it serving as a clinical placement site for some of the school’s nursing or medical students.
He envisions students living in Pikeville and commuting to Grundy or vice versa, ultimately benefiting both communities.
If the law school did merge with UPike — which would still require approval by both schools’ boards of trustees and their accreditors — the ASL board would dissolve. But each of UPike’s current graduate-level schools — a medical school, a college of optometry and a college of dental medicine — has two seats on the university’s board of trustees, according to Kilgore.
Kilgore said it would ultimately be up to UPike whether ASL had representation on its board of trustees, but he noted that the school could create an advisory board made up of former trustees or members of both communities with a vested interest in the law school.
The committee negotiating the merger is chaired by ASL board member Jeff Mitchell and includes Buchanan County attorney Lee Moise and County Administrator Craig Horn.
“They will be meeting with UPike and the team UPike hired to come up with a term sheet to negotiate and approve the merger,” Kilgore said.
ASL school officials said they hope a merger will be complete before the fall of 2027, but Webb wouldn’t provide a possible timeline.
UPike has retained a third party to help work through negotiations on behalf of both schools, Webb said in an email.
“The UPIKE board authorized this process because we believe an independent review is important. We need to allow that process to run before we can speculate on timing.”
The two schools already have a history of working together.
In the fall of 2025, the two institutions teamed up to offer a new online degree. The master’s of legal studies, or MLS, program is geared toward professionals who might not be interested in becoming attorneys, but are interested in the law.
About a dozen students enrolled in the program last year, Western told Cardinal News in May.
