But I also get why it made Bryant nervous as the hired manager not to have control over her own finances. She provided me with correspondence in which the board member in question tried to explain to her that the checks he wrote sometimes had to be back-dated and post-dated to make the monthly report balances come out right. Phew. That might give me the willies too. Bryant was basically telling the guy to come drop off the check book and find another volunteer activity.
She also got into it with another board member who was acting as a sort of self-appointed chief financial officer instead of chair of a board committee.
Jared Boggess
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Look, I hear this kind of stuff all the time about nonprofits. I have served on a couple of those boards myself, and I understand how it happens. The entity is sort of muddling along anyway, trying to get things done and not have to pay a bunch of professional fees all the time, and sometimes the muddling gets a little too muddled.
We're not talking about organized crime. We're usually not talking about organized much of anything. I was always really glad when somebody on a board I served on had actual business experience so it wasn't all management by journalism, a toxic brew if there ever was one.
The situation at the Discovery Gardens sounds like too much garden club, not enough business. But here's where things take a darker turn:
Let's say you report the irregularities to City Hall, and they tell you, "Oh, don't bother turning in any demands for public documents, because we wouldn't want them to start shredding documents over there." Two days later a reporter gets tipped that they're practically stuffing file cabinets into a tree chipper.
Up to that point, everybody was protected by the harmless dithering defense. Oh, gosh, did we do that? (Slow forehead slap). We didn't even know. But shredding is not dithering. There is nothing naive about shredding, even though I believe I heard something like that argument when I called about it.
I called Sarah Gardner, the interim director. She confirmed that there had been a big shredding party on the day in question, but she said, "We were doing that because we needed the space."
I went through the whole timeline with her about Randy Johnson going to see Paul Dyer and Joan Walne and their telling him not to do anything that might cause shredding.
"And then you suddenly needed the space?" I asked.
"I was unaware of the meeting," she said. "This is the first I have heard of that. We got a new intern, and we have a new director coming in, and we've been moving office spaces around, so those are just old financial records."
Old financial records. Not exactly what you want to hear. Would rather have heard they were shredding old garden party invitations.
"Those are 10-year-old documents," she said. "Those are financial documents. After 10 years you shred the old documents. That has nothing to do with this."
I said, "So there's nothing missing from the last 10 years?"
"No."
That's great. That's really great. It's such a relief, because I have a very strong belief, based on information provided to me, that a lot of the information that would be crucial to the allegations made by Bryant and Johnson still exists on other copies held in other venues.
So of course, if the allegations were taken seriously and someone were to look into them and the pertinent records were found to be not where they should be in the files, then we might wind up with news footage of people holding their raincoats up over their faces while being herded into the federal paddy wagon.
That would be a cruel, cruel fate indeed for people only trying to keep their garden club afloat. That's why, generally speaking, most garden clubs don't even really need to own document-shredding machines.
Financial records take up much less room than you might think. Just get rid of one large potted plant, and you have room to keep those old financial records another 20 years. That accomplishes two things: 1) You still have them if you need them, and 2) Your own employees, who know all about the meeting two days before with Dyer even though you strangely don't, don't have to walk by the glass doors where you're spending the entire day until nine o'clock at night stuffing bales of paper into shredders, and they don't have to get all panicky and have a big morale problem because they see you doing something that looks really sketchy to them.
Ah, the advantages of just not shredding. They are multiple.
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