NARROWS -- One nonprofit group says it offered to buy Cumberland Park so it could become a park instead of a coal ash fill site. But the nonprofit that says it wants to sell Cumberland Park to raise money for Giles County's vocational education program says that never happened.

George Santucci, executive director of the National Committee for the New River, said he made the offer to Howard Spencer, executive director of the Giles County Partnership for Excellence, in 2007.

"We tried to buy the property off him," Santucci said last week. "He refused to sell it to us.

"I said, 'Look, we'd be interested in buying the property.' He basically blew me off as soon as I said it."

Spencer has a different recollection.

"Mr. Standucci [sic] and I had a general conversation that I would describe as vague and ambiguous," Spencer wrote in an e-mail. "There was certainly no offer from Mr. Standucci."

Santucci said his group, which helped Pearisburg create Whitt-Riverbend Park, would have turned Cumberland Park's 13 acres into a similar park with a boat ramp.

The partnership plans to allow Appalachian Power to put about 254,000 cubic yards of coal ash at the site -- enough to raise nearly seven acres of riverbank about 30 feet, making it level with U.S. 460. That, Spencer says, will make a good building site that his group can sell to someone who will bring jobs Giles County. The money from the sale will go to the county's schools to support vocational education, he has said.