For what it's worth – not much, probably – nobody's sadder than me about the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund and the saga about to unfold around it. I know the history. It was one of those crumbs that poor black South Dallas had to wrench from a fat callous City Hall in the first place. Off on its own lone horse, riding without a posse, the whole thing seemed destined to fail from the start.
And we may be there now. If not, we're real close. A week ago the city auditor released an "audit" that was really a kind of biennial joke. Roughly every two years the auditor issues a report saying the trust fund, founded 27 years ago, still hasn't accomplished anything and still can't account for the money.
The money. It's complicated. Way too complicated. The SDFPTF is funded by a rake-off from ticket sales for all kinds of events at Fair Park plus about $40,000 a year in cash straight out of the city's general fund, otherwise known as your tax money. It's supposed to use that money to nurture business successes in the old black neighborhoods around Fair Park.
The trust fund came out of one of Dallas' typically sleazy racial deals in the bad old days, which were, like, yesterday. In the late 1980s the city was engaged in yet another of its many efforts over the years to expunge much of the poor black residential and retail area that pressed up against the massive fences surrounding Fair Park, this time in the name of parking.
The real goal then — visible again now even as we speak in the city's disingenuous attempt to "visually improve" MLK Boulevard, the main artery into the fair — was always to create a safe corridor by which white people might drive into the fair without being subjected to the sight of so many poor black people, who, as we know, scare white people. So the city set off on yet another round of property acquisitions, producing the vast asphalt veldt that now surrounds Fair Park and gives it that odd aura of seedy other-worldliness, like what happened to Oz 30 years after Dorothy left and real estate values fell. The other-worldliness is the point.
Rather than tell City Hall to go to hell and fight them off, black leadership in South Dallas in the '80s did what it had always done — settled for a slice of pie out the backdoor, in this case the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund. The fund was to be supported by a Byzantine web-work of ticket rake-offs from different events. I've had a little bit of experience myself trying to collect money from people in the entertainment business. The only way I know of to get what you have coming is to stand next to them while they sell the tickets and every time your share gets up to a dollar stick your hand out. Otherwise you might as well ask the audience for it on their way out.
But the city couldn't have the trust fund showing up at concerts like a collection agent, so instead it gave the fund a very vague general promise that its money would be collected for it by the Park and Recreation Department. Yeah, right, like that check was ever going to be in the mail.
Anyway, the recent city audit came out with all of the usual instances of money not getting counted, grants getting granted to the wrong people, a general picture of fiduciary ineptitude, all of it an almost word-for-word incantation of the same language making the same complaints of mismanagement going back almost to the founding of the trust fund in 1987. And laughably at the end were the same old responses of city staff saying they were right on top of the problems and would have everything cleared up pretty soon (wink-wink).
But this time was different. This time when the report came out at least two members of the City Council, Philip Kingston and Scott Griggs, were waiting for it, along with Kingston's appointee to the South Dallas Fair Park Trust Fund board, Suzanne Smith. Smith, owner of an MBA, served on the city's Board of Adjustment (knocks down derelict properties) appointed by former council person Veletta Lill. She was appointed to the Landmark Commission (saves derelict properties) by former council member Angela Hunt and worked for the city of Garland and Texas Municipal League before setting up shop as a consultant to social-change-oriented nonprofits. Not a dummy.
Kingston told me that Smith had told him that the trust fund probably is short many millions of dollars and that it's not clear which door the money went out of. Is the money missing because the fund got it from the city and then pissed it away? Or, in the case Smith thinks more likely, is it missing because the clowns at City Hall never delivered it in the first place?
Both Smith and Kingston were watching for the new bad audit report to see if the missing funds would be mentioned. Not one word.
Smith said to me: "I'm surprised that this audit report didn't discuss it. It was to me a golden opportunity to come clean and say, 'Look, we made a mistake, and here is how we are going to completely redo South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund.'"
Kingston said some much saltier things of which I wish I had been able to take notes but couldn't because I was already driving, texting and combing my hair in a school zone for the deaf. Basically Kingston told me the amount of money missing from the books at trust fund probably is in the neighborhood of five million bucks.
He said he had discussed the issue with City Manager A.C. Gonzalez, who had promised to address the matter but so far has not. Gonzalez told me he wouldn't comment on the work of the auditor, but he said his own office is aware of the issue and looking into it. He said the questions raised to him have to do with money the fund never got, not money the fund received but couldn't account for. City Auditor Craig D. Kinton sent me a list of prior audits over the years and said this year's audit didn't address the questions raised by Kingston and Smith.
I tried to reach former Dallas City Council member Diane Ragsdale, who is director of a nonprofit associated with the trust fund and is generally viewed as the fund's godmother. She didn't get back to me.
The clear impression created by the new audit, then, may not be merely incomplete but also terribly unfair. If somebody really knows that the missing amount is money the fund never got, then the picture painted in the recent audit — an array of bad accounting and managerial practices by the fund — points us in the wrong direction. But the fact is that nobody knows yet what direction to look in.
And there is where I start feeling sad about this. Five million bucks is quite a lot of money. It's an amount of money that isn't funny, the kind of money — and I devoutly hope this will not be the case — that people can go to the pokey for. Now that we know the discrepancy may even be in that neighborhood, the trail must be followed to its end.
I was just reading some stuff put out by the "What Works Collaborative," part of the Urban Institute, about research on successful economic development programs in challenged urban areas in America. It all seems to come back to one point. Getting anything done in really tough poor city neighborhoods requires an immense joining of hands, a pooling of resolve, expertise and resources where you have corporations and universities and community organizations all working together to make things happen.
So, no, you can't grudgingly carve out a little steam-control money for the neighborhood you're trying to turn into a parking lot, turn it over to a bunch of people who have no financial/fiduciary experience, leave them out there on their lonesome for years and then demand a happy ending.
Each and every one of those lousy audits over the years should have been a fire alarm. If anybody at City Hall or anywhere else in the city really gave a damn, they would have rushed down there and pitched in to bail the thing out.
The good news in what's going on right now is that Smith, Kingston and Griggs seem to have that thought in mind. Smith said, "The thing I would underscore is that right now we have a lot of opportunity in Fair Park. And here's this pot of money that is there that may not be being leveraged for its highest and best use."
If we were to act on that theme, if capable powerful elements in the city were to sweep in and offer support, then maybe this could be a turnaround after 27 long years. But if there is any finding that the missing amount is the fault of the fund, rather than the city, then the fight will be on in earnest between the told-you-so bigots and the thin-skinned race-carders.
The bigots will say it was all a waste of effort in the first place and what did you expect, you liberal fools? The race-carders will see and hear only the bigots. South Dallas leadership will angrily resist any effort to intervene that looks like it's coming from outside South Dallas. Either somebody figures out how to untie that knot, or it all ends in sadness.
