Take, for instance, the case of J. Daytona Burch.
In May 2005, the trust fund board approved a $22,750 "community-based nonprofit grant" for something called the Dr. Burch Arts and Magnet School. Not two months later, Leo Hicks sent Burch a letter informing him that his grant was to be suspended. As it turned out, on July 7, Hicks learned from the director of the Jeffries Street Learning Center, which has received more than $100,000 from the trust fund, that Burch was trying to operate his school out of their facility, even though he told the trust fund's board he was going to use a building on Second Avenue near Fair Park--going so far as to present a lease that Hicks learned Burch didn't actually have.
Illustration by Craig LaRotonda
In September, Mayor Laura Miller was branded a racist by
several council members when she got the council to
strip the trust fund of the more than $200,000 it
received from the city's general fund.
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In his letter to Burch, Hicks writes that he also got a call from someone at the Texas Workforce Commission, who "advised that former employees of the Magnet School have filed a claim against you for unpaid wages and that you informed said employees that they would receive their wages upon receipt of the grant." This was a huge no-no: Before handing over the grant, Burch had signed a contract stating that the money was to be used for funding the tuition of students.
Hicks refuses to acknowledge that he and the board were duped by Burch or that the money would have been lost forever had he not gotten those two calls.
"The letter didn't say he lied to us," Hicks says. "The letter said that we found out some additional information. I won't disparage anyone. I just think your interpretation is something I don't agree with."
Burch could not be reached for comment.
And then there's the case of Derrick Mitchem, who got a $29,000 grant in 2001 to open his motor sports museum in the old Bama Pie Co. building on Pennsylvania Avenue across the street from Fair Park, in a neighborhood where it sits next to abandoned, weed-strewn lots. Mitchem's been trying to get the museum open since 2000, when he bought the building for $50,000 and said he'd need $600,000 to rehab the place. Yet after getting trust fund money, as well as $290,000 from the city in community development block grant money and another $45,000 from the South Dallas Development Corp., the place looks like an abandoned construction site and nothing more.
Sources say Mitchem's delay is making the trust fund "nervous," because the grant was supposed to be used within a year of its being received--and he is wayoverdue, to the tune of four years.
Mitchem couldn't be reached on his cell or home numbers, but Chaney insists it will be open by the holidays.
"Maybe," says Caraway, "but who in the hell wants a motor sports museum right there? Black folks ain't interested."
Hicks insists he welcomes any changes Ryan Evans or Zavitkowsky or McKinney or the mayor want to throw his way. Fact is, he's exhausted by the last two year's worth of fighting--tired of being scapegoated by city officials who blame him for the fund's failures and tired of being dogged by folks in the neighborhood who line up each May for the grants handed out like early Christmas presents.
"I know there will be some changes," he says. "I know that the process by which we will arrive at that will be prudent, that it won't be instantaneous and that it will happen in the fullness of time. But there will be some changes to the trust fund. I think they are necessary. I think they will be appropriate. I don't think the changes will be without conflict because growth is conflict. I think there will probably be some new rules and procedures, a tightening-up process. There will be more due diligence before the money is given out, more stringent requirements. I think to some extent there will be a lessening of the mindset and practice of the 'lender of last resort,' and I think the change in that mindset will be unsettling." He smiles, then offers with deadpan understatement, "It should be interesting. "
