July 17, 2008 Issue
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Classified Chestnut Hill Local Don't Miss an Issue, Tell us what you see or Winner of Two |
Opinion
Baffled by RecycleBank rebuff For the streets department, the citywide single-stream program represented the culmination of years of planning, financial maneuverings and implementation. But for both the Philadelphia based RecycleBank company and its customers, it was a blow. As one longtime Hiller and RecycleBank participant, Alexander Nalle, put it, “It’s one of the best things the city does.” Most residents and participants were unaware that RecycleBank operated for the past three years without a contract or any compensation from the city. It became clear over time that the company benefited from the arrangement as it grew and won contracts with nearby municipalities. But there is little doubt that the original idea was to win over city hall with its generous offering and incentive based program that rewards recyclers and promotes local business. The program works by weighing the amount of recycling a household does and then awarding points that can be redeemed for gift certificates to stores such as Starbucks or Acme. The results are utterly convincing. In Wilmington, Delaware the participation rate, meaning the number of households that recycle jumped to 40 percent in just six months. In Chestnut Hill the participation rate held steady at 90 percent and in West Oak Lane the participation rate jumped from 20 to 90 percent during the program. On the other hand, the city’s participation rate has remained stagnant at eight percent even in areas that have had single-stream recycling for a couple of years now (The program began in 2006 in the Northeast). The folks at RecycleBank have expressed little other than confusion over the city’s stance against the program. The streets department has maintained that the program is just too expensive to undertake. And now residents are scratching their heads, wondering why the city does not see the value in the program. “There are few places in the city as well to do as Chestnut Hill,” Nalle said. “It’s important that the city gets recycling right in areas that are lower income where these incentives are really helpful, not just with encouraging recycling but where the rewards could be meaningful to people with less discretionary income.” Another Chestnut Hill resident who has been participating in RecycleBank since it began in 2005, Ellen Hass said she was shocked to hear that the program was ending. “The city has the lowest recycling rate in the country (for cities of its size or bigger),” she said. “Why not use RecycleBank to create an incentive.” Why not? For one, the math does not add up, said Luke Butler, Mayor Nutter’s deputy press secretary. “It would cost the city $3 million in overtime each year,” he said. “That is money that the city is now saving and can be put toward programs that would benefit those same (low income) people in other programs.” Butler said the city is hoping the convenience of ease of single-stream recycling will start producing the kinds of participation rates RecycleBank enjoys. Unfortunately, without an incentive based program, many residents fear that hope may be the only commodity increasing in the city. Jennifer Katz
CHCF president responds to critics of the fund Recent opinion columns by Jim Foster and other former board members of the Chestnut Hill Community Association (CHCA) have implied that there may be irregularities in the current operations of the Chestnut Hill Community Fund (CHCF). The CHCF trustees are disinclined generally to engage in letter-writing campaigns in the Local, and to date we have refrained from “taking the bait.” But as the president of the CHCF, I’ve now concluded that it would be irresponsible for me to leave unanswered these relentless, inaccurate and misleading innuendoes because the community needs to know that these allegations are untrue. It is unfortunate that the Local has not seen fit to investigate and report the controversy in an objective and fair manner. Instead, the community is left with only “Opinion” pieces or Letters to the Editor, making it difficult or impossible for members of the community to understand the facts. In 2007, the CHCA bylaws were amended to require reports from the CHCF to the CHCA semi-annually. The CHCF trustees have complied with that requirement completely. Since the current trustees took office in January of 2007, they reported at the CHCA board in February and October 2007, and at the Annual Meeting in April 2008. The CHCF has independently audited financial statements for fiscal years 2006 and 2007. The 2008 audit is currently underway. (Prior to 2006, the CHCA and CHCF decided to conduct audits every other year to save the expense. That decision was reversed in 2007 and the financial statements are now audited annually.) When the CHCF fiscal year-end 2007 audited financial statement and the 990 Federal tax return were completed last August, they were distributed to the CHCA board. The audited financial statements are posted on the CHCA website. When the FYE 2008 statement and 990 return are completed this August, the CHCF will publish them too and they will be posted on the CHCA website for all to access. The fund has not changed auditors “three years in a row,” as Foster alleged. The fund has used the same auditing firm and/or auditor since at least the early 1990s. Last August, due to the hue and cry from Foster and others about the 2006 audit, the fund arranged a meeting with the auditor so that Foster could ask any questions that he wanted about the 2006 audit. Foster never showed up for the meeting! To eliminate any doubt about the auditors, the CHCA and CHCF conducted a Request for Proposal for its auditor, and a new firm, St. Clair CPAs, P.C., was hired. The new firm was able to reconcile the accounts based on the 2006 audit and gave the CHCF an unqualified audit for FYE 2007. Accountants from the St. Clair firm attended a meeting of the CHCF trustees and two meetings of the CHCA to present the audits and respond to any questions. St. Clair never suggested that it wanted to re-audit 2006, as Foster states. The St. Clair firm is currently conducting the FYE 2008 audits. Neither Foster nor his fellow antagonists attended the annual meeting of the CHCA and CHCF this spring. If they had, they would have heard the CHCF report on the financial status of the fund and its investment performance. The balance as of year-end 2007 was $876,989 and the closing balance as of the end of the fiscal year (March 30, 2008) was $753,275. At the meeting, I explained that the drop in value was attributable to taxes and the performance of the stock market. The CHCF paid unrelated business income tax due upon the capital gain on the sale of 8431 Germantown Ave., which was debt-financed. (The CHCF is a tax-exempt organization, but tax-exempt organizations must pay taxes if they have unrelated business income.) I reported that the investment loss for that quarter was approximately 4.95 percent, which was less of a loss than the market benchmarks for the fund. We also reported that the CHCF had an excellent Annual Fund Drive, raising a total of over $80,000, the highest amount raised in years. The CHCA and CHCF also had a very successful Black and White Gala and silent auction fundraiser last fall. If Foster had attended the Black and White Gala and silent auction fundraiser last fall, he would know that it was a not only a well-attended and fun neighborhood event for the community but also a financial fundraising success for the CHCF and CHCA. Foster’s statement that there has been a “massive decline in fund raising” is, again, wrong. Foster contends that the CHCF is not “transparent” because it does not give monthly financial statements to the CHCA. The CHCF is a tax-exempt trust, run by volunteers, that has no obligation to provide the CHCA with monthly financial statements. The only legal obligation, as stated above, is to report to the CHCA semi-annually. The CHCF funds are not the CHCA’s funds. They are charitable assets raised in the community for charitable projects in support of the community. The CHCA recommends the annual grants to be made by the CHCF, but the CHCA is neither the fiduciary nor the owner of the CHCF funds. In the past, the CHCA has drawn upon the CHCF funds for its own operational and administrative expenses. The current trustees, on the advice of independent legal counsel, have discontinued that practice. Notwithstanding, transparency and accountability to the community are very important to the CHCF, so let me explain why the CHCF no longer provides monthly statements to the CHCA board. Initially, we discontinued the practice because the CHCA bookkeeper, who also maintains the CHCF accounts, became ill and the statements were not available. Thereafter, we did not have confidence that the statements were up to date and, upon reflection, we decided that we should not be releasing financial reports to the CHCA board that the CHCF trustees had not reviewed and approved. The CHCF trustees do not meet every month, and the CHCA board was getting the CHCF financial statements in advance of the CHCF trustees’ review of the statements. We have been working with the bookkeeper since her return to complete the FYE 2008 financial statement, prepare the 2009 budget, work with the auditors to complete the audit and 990 tax return on time, and change the form of reporting to the CHCF trustees. These items are the priorities for the trustees. Among the other activities of the CHCF trustees during the last 18 months, as reported to the CHCA board at various meetings (where the Local was present), we reviewed and changed the accounting practices between the CHCA and the CHCF. We now have separate accounts for the CHCF real estate activities, the fund drive and the CHCF administrative activities. Only trustees have signature authority on CHCF accounts. We adopted Grant Accountability Reports and Grant Agreements for CHCF grant recipients that were implemented in this year’s fund drive. We investigated the legal status of the CHCA and CHCF and confirmed the legal parameters under which we can provide funds to the CHCA. We participated in a joint CHCA/CHCF study team to review the legal relationship between the two organizations, leading to a suggestion that the CHCA should consider conversion from a 501(c)(4) to a 501(c)(3) organization. (The CHCA subsequently formed a committee that now is reviewing the conclusions of the study team.) We adopted a conflicts of interest policy. We amended the CHCF bylaws to conform the fiscal year and the organizational meeting requirements to current practice. We met on a number of occasions with the investment manager at Merrill Lynch to review and discuss the investments. We undertook substantial, long-deferred maintenance to the first floor storefronts of Town Hall. We found and lost a tenant for one of the first floor storefronts and we have been actively seeking a new tenant. In January and February 2008, we spent a considerable amount of time responding to lawyers representing Foster and others seeking to review CHCF records. The Community Manager and others at Town Hall spent days pulling all of the requested records together. I personally hauled three bins of documents to my office in Center City. Neither the lawyers nor Foster ever bothered to look at the documents! In fact, the lawyers never even had the courtesy of responding to my phone calls asking when they would come to review them. I finally returned the documents to the CHCA offices in May. For Foster to imply from his computer desk chair that we have done nothing or that “very possibly” irregularities exist in the operations of the CHCF really galls me. The CHCF trustees have worked hard over the last 18 months to do all the things that the trust and good nonprofit governance require. On the other hand, what constructive act has Foster made to raise money, save money, or improve the Chestnut Hill community in the last few years? And why does the Local continue to print opinion columns and letters replete with factual misstatements and serious allegations that the Editor knows, or has reason to know, are wrong?
Jean C. Hemphill is president and trustee of the Chestnut Hill Community Fund.
Editor’s note: The Local does not print anything we know to be untrue or misleading and often edit statements out of opinion pieces we have reason to believe are untrue or misleading. We did fail on one count in Foster’s recent piece in which he writes that St. Clair had asked to re-audit fiscal year 2006 and “were refused by management.” While Foster insists he was told such, Alan Gubernick, a St. Clair auditor who worked on the audits of the fund and association told the Local Foster’s comments were not accurate. The intention was to strike the comment from the article, but the edit was not made. The Local has reported on the efforts of Foster and other present and former directors to challenge recent financial practices of the fund and the association, most recently in an article “Directors in CHCA challenge issue terms to terminate finance fight,” on May 1, 2008. Hemphill spoke to the Local for that story, but would only do so on background, meaning we could not quote her directly. She recently, however, agreed to be interviewed on the record for a future story. In the meantime, we’re glad to finally have this response to Foster’s published opinions.
“A plague o’ both your houses” is NOT an adequate response On finding the dead bodies of Juliet, Romeo and Paris, and considering all the dead bodies of the previous months, how could anybody in Mantua have said anything other than, “A plague o’ both your houses! Some on the Board of Directors of the Chestnut Hill Community Association seem mostly interested in casting blame or covering up blame. Their interest often seems not in the issues or the facts, but who presents the information. For example, some defending the recent election (in which the fact is that some of the election procedures were not followed) do so by describing the people involved as “respected members of the community.” And indeed they are. And so were Mercutio and Tybalt. But people’s actions need to be judged on what those actions are, not on who does them. Mary Sue Welch in her recent letter wonders why anybody would have rejected the offer to have an independent audit when the auditor’s fees would be covered by a donor. Indeed, it was I who made a motion at one of the Board meetings shortly after I had rejoined the Board to move ahead with such a plan. In my preamble to the motion, I explained that the purpose was neither to cast blame nor to deny blame, but rather to do what most of us do with our bank accounts, specifically, try to find out how much money we actually have, and how we spent it. So, also, it made sense to establish how much money the Chestnut Hill Community actually had so that we had a basis on which to proceed with confidence. I explained that the whole purpose of having an independent audit was to put to rest the bickering that was coming from those saying, “The sky is falling,” or those saying, “Everything is perfect.” The purpose was to reconcile and move ahead. Immediately after the idea was proposed, it was challenged, not on the basis of its merit, but, instead with an angry voice, “and who is the donor?” Before I had a chance to respond Jim Foster spoke up. The moment he spoke I knew the proposal was dead. It does not matter what Jim says, right or wrong, it will be voted against by “the other side.” Sad. The Community Association has its Tybalts, people of strength and skill, but who listen only to a few. The Community Association has its Mercutios, people of intelligence and wit, but who seemingly are mostly interested in catching fish on barbed hooks. So, as the Montagues killed the Capulets and the Capulets killed the Montagues, the ancient grudges break out into new mutinies. One can understand why Benvolio said, “A plague o’ both your houses!” But plagues do not heal. Believing that the solution is simply to close one’s eyes and to speak softly is unwise. As the Prince of Verona surveys the wreckage in Mantua, he castigates himself for “winking at your discords.” No, tuning out is just as unfortunate as bombastic bickering or dishonest cover-up. The solution is not to ignore the sorry state into which the “two households,” “both alike in dignity,” have fallen, but rather to attend to the issues, rather than focus on personalities or old loyalties. If a “respected” person says or does something wrong, it is wrong. If a person who appears to be a troublemaker says or does something right, it is right. True friends do not cover up their friends’ mistakes. The members of the Board, especially the leadership who set the tone, need to pay attention to what is said and done, not who said or did it. Perhaps that will start happening, in which case the wonderful organization that was started years ago can flourish in this blessed Chestnut Hill. Were we all to start paying attention to what people actually said and did, rather than who they are, perhaps those who we ignore would stop shouting. Or, perhaps we will need something like the death of Romeo and Juliet, so that we, “with their death, bury (our) parents’ strife.”
George Spaeth is a past president of the CHCA and a current board member.
Faith-based initiatives … again Thanks to a recent statement by Barack Obama, “faith-based initiatives” are again in the news. The fact that his comments managed to draw fire from both liberals and conservatives may well indicate that he’s onto something. It is simply not true, as some have claimed, that faith-based institutions could not receive federal, state, or city dollars prior to the Bush Administration. They always could, and, in recent memory, always have. The populations that Neighborhood Interfaith Movement (NIM) – the organization that I direct – serves have benefited from grants from all levels of government since well before the president established the faith-based initiatives program. So have the clients of Catholic Charities, Jewish Children and Family Services, Lutheran Social Services, Methodist Services, Episcopal Community Services (etc., etc. – you get the idea). What these agencies have in common is that they are 501(c)(3) non-profits established to serve the community as a whole, acting out on a daily basis the human values expressed by their faiths. But they are not attached directly to a congregation and do not preach their faith or require clients to have any connection with any denomination whatsoever. They serve all eligible people regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or gender. They do not discriminate in hiring. However, recognizing the connection between them and the religious body out of which they grew, they are generally led by a member of that faith and provide certain targeted services to their faith’s clients (for example, kosher food, Christmas celebrations). I consider these latter “accommodations” to be the minimum necessary to meet specialized needs without jeopardizing the ability of the agency to serve all. Common sense trumps the need for theoretical “purity” (even the wall of separation can be scaled, as long as the climbing is made difficult and the end result essentially neutral), and millions of people get served without trampling on the Constitution. Over the past few years, government grants (especially federal) have been given to individual congregations and clergy groups that take an avowedly sectarian stance. By their own self-definition they cannot separate their specific religious beliefs from the work they seek to do. So government has suggested various rules – some would say contortions – to overcome anticipated legal objections. So, for example, a congregation can display posters that advertise a particular religion or program, but workers cannot invite clients directly to the advertised events. That may seem like an appropriate compromise (after all, how can you tell a church not to have an events bulletin board?). But there is no rule that requires them to post religious events other than their own (after all, would we really expect a church to advertise Jewish and Muslim services?). The fact that these work-arounds are necessary demonstrates the existence of potential constitutional dangers. Furthermore, it is my sense that the new groups that have gotten the “faith-based money” are precisely those whose theology prevents them from starting “secular” 501(c)(3)s – or they would have done so years ago. Giving tax money to such groups is bound, therefore, to raise constitutional issues. I must therefore conclude that this administration’s “faith-based initiative” was specifically intended to challenge the “wall of separation” – part of an ingenious scheme to win elections and gain the power to appoint judges who would overturn progressive constitutional interpretations like religion/state separation. In his recent talk, Mr. Obama said, “If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion …… Federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be used on secular programs.” To which Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, responded, “For those of us who believe in protecting the integrity of our religious institutions, this is a fundamental right …… He’s rolling back the Bush protections. That’s extremely disappointing.” To me Cizik’s comment proves that “faith-based initiatives” were indeed meant to challenge the “establishment clause.” Is there a way to accommodate these religious groups? If they insist on maintaining recent practice, which Obama and liberals oppose, I would say, “NO.” But the “old way” still exists: establishing a “secular” faith-based non-profit like NIM or like those started by the various religious bodies mentioned above. It would be interesting to consider whether constitutional issues might be avoided if there were a requirement that, if sectarian groups wish to run programs under their congregational nonprofit status, they would have to join in that endeavor with a group of congregations representing, say, three or more faiths, not all of which could be Christian. Rabbi Carl Choper, director of the Interfaith Alliance of Pennsylvania, recently stated, “It is a misuse of politics and an abuse of religion for religion to become a political tool, or for the political system to become the tool of a particular faith tradition.” Entangling the two does harm to both. While getting funds to “do good deeds” is both tempting and admirable, doing so without regard to the consequences is neither wise nor ethical. Rabbi George Stern is executive director of Neighborhood Interfaith Movement (NIM), a coalition of 60 Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Unitarian congregations and faith institutions dedicated to building a more just and sensitive community through learning, service, and advocacy. NIM is located at 7047 Germantown Avenue.
The Space Wars of Ming the Merciless Another trip to book-teeming Maine and now another crop of books to fit in somewhere, somehow, back home. Through most of my life I was a library builder, only too happy to buy the books I wanted to read and even the books I might want to read someday in the future. Each new purchase was a welcome addition to my home and served as another brick in building my library. People who love acquiring books and reading — they are actually two different passions – or addictions — probably do not need to hear an explanation for why someone would want to fill his home’s valuable wall space with shelves upon shelves of books. Like myself, they probably never thought otherwise. The joys of growing up, getting educated, finding a job and a spouse, are but the mere preliminaries to the joyful, loving process of having a space where one can start to build a library. I’ve done that since I was a teenager. But, alas, I too grow old, Father William. Six walls of my small house are devoted, floor-to-ceiling, to books. Many rows are double-shelved. If I do not add more cases, there is no room for new books. And I have decided there will be no more cases added. Sooner or later, there literally would be no more room to add a case. I might as well start being judicious before I’m completely addle-pated. (Believe me, as a professional bookman, I’ve been in houses where the shelf space ran out and the person started stacking books on the floor. I’ve walked through narrow, tottering aisles where the books wobbled high above my head. Will they ever find me? I wondered.) Well, if one refuses to add shelves, but new books arrive … what’s to do? I started culling. First, get rid of all those “What ever possessed me to think I’d read this?” books. Things that looked good in the store, or whose authors had recently been mentioned in a review or interview. I pull them from the shelf and think, “No, life’s too short,” and put them in the growing pile of books to put on the next out-of town bus. Next, I got rid of most of the books I kept around as argument-settlers. Who was born on this day in history? College mascot names. Song lyrics. I opened my laptop, typed some sample questions into Google, and if it seemed that the information was a mere Internet tap or two away, out went the book. Sounds sensible, doesn’t it? Mister Logic, right? My wife calls me Ming the Merciless when I start throwing away things. She won’t let me near the freezer or pantry when I’m twitching to read expiration dates. But, what the heck, one must have a system, or all would be randomness. Having removed the unreadable books, and the unnecessary books, I move on to the question of: Does one have an obligation to one’s children to have a vast and wonderful collection of classic books around the house, just waiting to be discovered? I think so. What is a home without a set of Shakespeare, Dickens, the Romantic Poets, a couple of wonderfully thick poetry anthologies, some Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Trollope, Austen, Bronte(s), Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, the writings of Martin Luther King, and so on? But that’s a fair amount of space to give up. In my case, this problem was solved when my son decided to build his own library of classic literature. That liberated my shelves. I felt that if I have a desire to read any of the classics, they are easily borrowed from the library or bought in paperback from a used bookshop. Problem solved. That decision allowed me to get down to the nitty-gritty. I decided to get rid of any book I had not read or consulted in the past five years. Sounds reasonable, no? I rolled up my sleeves the day I made that decision and strode determinedly toward my favorite bookcase. Ming the Merciless, just in on the red eye and ready to make the hard decisions. I hit the wall immediately. First book I grabbed, a fat, dark book so faded I couldn’t read the spine. I opened it. Holy cow! I still have this? Notre-Dame De Paris or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, published in a cheap dark blue cloth in 1937 by The Book League of America. I paid 35 cents for it at Leary’s Bookstore when I was nineteen. I gobbled it up then. I was so enchanted by the love story and swept up by the grand historical events behind it I felt almost bereft when I came to the end. I was sitting in a field somewhere, my back against a tree. I wanted to shout, to scream, to cry, to run, to do anything but quietly close the cover. I stood up and yelled and threw the book across the meadow as far as I could to commemorate coming to end of one of the grandest episodes of my life. When I calmed down, I retrieved it, of course, and found I’d weakened the binding a bit by giving it such a ride. Since then, through every triumph and crisis, and mostly, through all the quiet, uneventful days of my life, it has lived with me and given witness to my life. I opened the book this morning. The front covers are filled with quotes I’d written. “… architecture developed side by side with human thought.” And, “Every civilization starts with theocracy and ends in democracy.” This was not for a course, by the way, so I am as surprised as you may be to see that I was not as much of a dunce as I remember myself being. And then, out of curiosity, I turned to the blank endpapers at the back of the book. Yes, there they were, as they were in every book I owned, the vocabulary words. Part of the joy of reading was to stumble upon new words I’d never known, words strewn in my path by these wise, educated authors who were trying to uplift us all. With gratitude, I’d accept the challenge, write the words down, mark the page where they appeared, look them up, try to remember them. That’s become the habit of a lifetime. And now, today, I reread the list: p. 182, seraglio; p. 184, chimera; p. 204, hauteur… and so through orthography… effulgent … profligacy … to …rivulets. Finding these notes is better than finding a batch of old photographs. I get a sense of what I must have been like. So, no, this Hunchback stays. It will not leave to make room for the books bought in Maine last week. I start looking for others I can remove, but this is not a good day for book weeding. I have begun to evolve a new principle: Any book that evokes a strong emotional reaction in me when I look at it, any book that triggers the memory of a certain day, or time, or the way the sun slanted through the window on the lazy day when I first saw it or finished reading it, any book like that is safe. They’ll stay with me and we’ll see this journey through together. Hugh can be contacted at hughmore@yahoo.com.
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